Guide to Color Tools

🎨 curated list of some of the top tools for color palettes

There are so many color tools, and yet new ones appear almost every day 🙈 And that’s a good thing! Tools evolve, priorities change, and some become outdated while others offer better solutions to specific color challenges. It might not be the final list, but these are the ones I’m aware of and find useful.

Ready to use color palettes for dataviz

⭐ Here is the list of color tools that you can take and start using in data visualizations immediately.

• colorbrewer
  Focus on color schemes optimized for maps and data visualizations, with accessibility filters. It’s safe to use and gives a good variety of colors tailored for data visualization.

  

• carto
  Colors for maps. Tested palettes for better maps.

  

• Color Buddy
  Build and text color pallets for your dataviz

• Viz Palette
  To check how your colors will look on the charts

Tableau related

These tools allow export to Tableau and/or we created in Tableau

• Color Tool by Interworks
  With export to Tableau

• Datafam Colors by Ken Flerlage
  Crowdsourcing palettes from the Tableau community

• Color Palettes for Tableau by Jacob Olsufka

• Hex Code Previewer + XML Generator by Brittany Rosenau

• Color Contrast & Accessibility Tester by Sam Epley

R related

List of color related libraries and packages for R

• r-color-palettes by Emil Hvitfeldt
  Comprehensive list of color palettes in R

• prismatic
  It helps with the automatic color choice and finds the best_contrast() colors

• https://r-charts.com/color-palettes/
  Collection of R color palettes

• paletteer
  Common R palettes

• cols4all
  Choose colors with the interactive dashboard inside

• colorspace

• i want hue
  Not for R actually but mostly Data Science, like finding colors for k-means

Design-related

Colors tool which should be used with an additional check on data vizualizations. Mostly for designers.

• coolors.co
  Quickly generate palettes with a single click, explore trending palettes, create palettes from the image, and visualize them on the website design

• happyhues
  Color palette inspiration with real examples

• 0to255
  With random color palettes

• leonardocolor.io
  Create, manage, and share color palettes. Also for dataviz!

• colormind.io
  Color scheme generator that uses deep learning

• Huetone by Alexey Ardov
  For accessible colors design

  

• poline
  Color palette generator by coordinates

When choosing a color palette for data visualization, make sure it has enough distinct colors and adequate contrast. Most color palettes from brand guidelines might not be suitable for data visualization purposes. In that case, you can use the brand palette as a base and create a data visualization-specific palette from it. Don’t forget to test it with tools like Viz Palette.

Also, check out

• Comprehensive color guide → https://colorandcontrast.com/#/

• Google but for color → https://picular.co

• Game to find colors on the color wheel → https://color.method.ac

• Miro board with Datawrapper materials about color. You’ll find the answer to all color-related questions here!