Color Blindness -- color questions

MissJR

MissJR

not in the mood for your shenanigans
Team MTBNJ Halter's
We've been running more complicated charts in the newsletters where I work. It used to be I only needed to make something a colored line with a gray or black line and we're done. (I mean originally, these charts were even just black and gray.) But now we're running more charts with more information. And I'm wondering if these charts are color blind friendly. I stay away from red and green for a variety of reasons. And, as far as I know, we haven't gotten any complaints, but I would like to eventually come up with a guideline for these charts (fonts, sizes, colors to choose from, etc) and I want to know if what we've been running is problematic. I welcome input from graphic designers with experience in making shitty excel charts as well. And we will also eventually be moving to making interactive versions in Infogram once the websites and backend are updated (probably still at least a few months/a year away tho).

Sample chart:

Screenshot 2024-07-24 091138.png


NOTE: I do not want to "out" anyone or have anyone disclose their color blindness/medical conditions publicly if they don't want to.... so feel free to shoot me a message and tell me it's great or it's garbage.
 
I have an issue with blue/green - I can clearly see the difference here.

----
just looking at the graph cause data....ignore, since it is just me thinking through my fingers.

This idea might confuse people, if you are looking for more range (your chart is dominated by $25-50) set the lower limit to 20% or even 30% -
then it might be easier to see the $200-250 is around 4% shrinking to 1ish - I suspect in interactive/display mode, ya just hover over it for the percentage and count.

Looking at the title and the graph, I see the $25-50 group growing at a rate higher than that of the $100+ groups.
So it works - if that is the point. My next question would be are there 10 new $25-50 to replace each lost $250+ ?
or has the number of $250+ stayed the same, and the low end is growing?
(i'm sure these are addressed in the next graphs on the page - just an observation)

oh, does the ($M) mean thousands of dollars or millions? I've seen it both ways and find it confusing ($MM meaning millions)
 
Patrick said:
I have an issue with blue/green - I can clearly see the difference here.
Click to expand...
Thanks!

Patrick said:
just looking at the graph cause data....ignore, since it is just me thinking through my fingers.

This idea might confuse people, if you are looking for more range (your chart is dominated by $25-50) set the lower limit to 20% or even 30% -
then it might be easier to see the $200-250 is around 4% shrinking to 1ish - I suspect in interactive/display mode, ya just hover over it for the percentage and count.

Looking at the title and the graph, I see the $25-50 group growing at a rate higher than that of the $100+ groups.
So it works - if that is the point. My next question would be are there 10 new $25-50 to replace each lost $250+ ?
or has the number of $250+ stayed the same, and the low end is growing?
(i'm sure these are addressed in the next graphs on the page - just an observation)

oh, does the ($M) mean thousands of dollars or millions? I've seen it both ways and find it confusing ($MM meaning millions)
Click to expand...

i am limited to what the editors want... and this is how they wanted to represent the info. i've made a few suggestions (especially since i'm not a "numbers" person so i feel like if i'm confused, then the info isn't really clear) but i've been basically told "this is how is going to be" sooooo

and interactive would probably have the hover over feature for actual numbers and maybe a blurb about it but this is just for print right now
 
MissJR said:
We've been running more complicated charts in the newsletters where I work. It used to be I only needed to make something a colored line with a gray or black line and we're done. (I mean originally, these charts were even just black and gray.) But now we're running more charts with more information. And I'm wondering if these charts are color blind friendly. I stay away from red and green for a variety of reasons. And, as far as I know, we haven't gotten any complaints, but I would like to eventually come up with a guideline for these charts (fonts, sizes, colors to choose from, etc) and I want to know if what we've been running is problematic. I welcome input from graphic designers with experience in making shitty excel charts as well. And we will also eventually be moving to making interactive versions in Infogram once the websites and backend are updated (probably still at least a few months/a year away tho).

Sample chart:

View attachment 243745


NOTE: I do not want to "out" anyone or have anyone disclose their color blindness/medical conditions publicly if they don't want to.... so feel free to shoot me a message and tell me it's great or it's garbage.
Click to expand...
1721830101329.png
rTalk, the charts look good colorwise
 
I went down this rabbit hole a few weeks ago too, it comes down to color contrast ratios. There are some pretty good online resources, I will try to find the ones I used
 
I'm red/ green color blind so I can't tell you what I can't see but these chats sometimes don't seem "right" to me.
 
There is a B/W filter in Photoshop/InDesign, iirc.

You basically need to make sure the saturation of each color is different, or you can wind up with a color situation where grayscale turns it a uniform color.

My mother in law did a series of paintings that played off that--they are colored, but if you take a B+W photo, they're flat grey.

I would also suggest building the graph key vertically/horizontal, following the pattern of the bars, that way you can count them out, even if you can't match the color.

Also possible to change the swatches to patterns (hashes, dots, stars, etc).
 
Red/green here and I would need to really study that graph before understanding what it all meant.
 
JDurk said:
Red/green here and I would need to really study that graph before understanding what it all meant.
Click to expand...

the whole package was with a story (Office Sales Sink Even More; Newmark Leads), a few rankings tables, a map showing office sales volume in the 20 largest markets and an additional line chart... so this singular bar chart probably doesn't make much sense without the rest of the package... although, ironically most of the time these charts don't make much sense to me period so there's that.

i'm mostly concerned with how the colors appear to people who are either partially or fully color blind... like can you see the different sections in each bar or do they appear just same shade of gray?
 
MissJR said:
the whole package was with a story (Office Sales Sink Even More; Newmark Leads), a few rankings tables, a map showing office sales volume in the 20 largest markets and an additional line chart... so this singular bar chart probably doesn't make much sense without the rest of the package... although, ironically most of the time these charts don't make much sense to me period so there's that.

i'm mostly concerned with how the colors appear to people who are either partially or fully color blind... like can you see the different sections in each bar or do they appear just same shade of gray?
Click to expand...
I do see the different colors. Where the 25-50 and 50-75 break is, that's the trouble spot.
 
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