Tableau and Color Palettes
Tableau is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows for interactive visualizations of large sets of data. I have successfully used Tableau to connect to text data sets of more than 2 million rows and have been able to generate large interactive visualizations for biodiversity data sets and departmental annual reports for the UM College of LS&A. Tableau allows users to define their own color palettes using a simple xml based schema, and I have recently coded color schemes for 1) University of Michigan based branding, 2) Wes Anderson Palettes , and 3) some Bauhaus inspired color sets.You can ignore all the following and just jump to the two links below to get started:
- How to customize colors in Tableau
- My Tableau preferences file from github (which includes the color palettes)
This file assumes a windows operating system, so the file has the default line endings generating by the Context Text Editor in windows.
Wolverine Maize and Blue
The university of Michigan has a design principles guide that defines brand standards and establishes a style guide for UM colors. |
| UM Color Palette |
I defined a set of UM based color palettes around this scheme
- UM Maize to Blue -- a diverging color from maize to blue for use for tagging continuous data
- UM Web -- the set of UM web colors for identifiying categorical data
- UM Print Neutral -- the set of neutral and muted colors for print media
- UM Print Bright -- the set of bright colors for print media
- UM Print All -- All primary and secondary colors for print media including metallic
- UM Expanded -- A small set of expanded colors
Use for a visualization with UM web colors would look like the following:
Wes Anderson Color Palette
The excellent Wes Anderson Palletes tumblr has a fun set of Wes Anderson inspired color palettes. Some of theses have been transformed to color palettes for R (https://github.com/karthik/wesanderson) and I wanted to have access to these in Tableau . |
| Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern. |
These color palettes all start with the Wes prefix and include all color palettes available from the tumblr on March 18th, 2014.
A 'Life Aquatic' palette visualization is:
Bauhaus
My personal aesthetic tends to be drawn to more modern and simple form-follows-function Bauhaus inspired color themes. I've added a simple Bauhaus inspired set along with a color-theory wheel. I will possibly also add a Le Corbusier color set as well. |
| 12 color wheel from Johannes Itten |
This set includes:
- Bauhaus -- Simple 5 color Bauhaus influenced theme
- Farbkreis -- 12 color color wheel from Johannes Itten
