[AkelaA]

I can't help but notice that many of the "non ideal" examples are pretty much identical to the colors used by companies like Google: https://blog.datawrapper.de/img/full-200805_goodcolors28.png. Apple is another company that's not afraid to use extremely bold, saturated colors in their UI designs: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... - in fact the colors chosen in that UI goes against a large amount of the advice found on this article, that green to lime gradient is pretty much 100% saturated for example, with a background that is absolute #000000 black.

The main theme of this article is to try to use complementary colors that aren't overly saturated or "pure", which is decent enough advice most of the time, but I feel that in an attempt to find color schemes that are more "professional looking", the author has used colors that come across as overly staid for most applications - navy blues and olive greens that are more associated with serious banking institutions then anything else. Which I guess is fine for infographics that need to display a level of trust and seriousness, but maybe not so much for a mobile app or social network that wishes to put on a more playful, friendlier face.

[saagarjha]

Apple's charts are meant to pop out, though; they serve a very different purpose than a graph in an article about energy consumption in Cambodia. It seems to me that if you're using color just for the sake of distinguishing things then you want to make them more muted, and if you are trying to draw the eye towards something, or give it personality, you go towards more vibrant hues.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Which is a very relevant point that should have been included in the article.

There's also the gender difference. Men are more likely to be colour blind, women are more likely to have better colour differentiation and also to have a subtly different colour hue perception. So women see subtle distinctions with more clarity, and see hues biased slightly away from red compared to men, with green being seen as slightly more yellow.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-babble/201504/...

A lot of the work in this area - including ColorBrewer - is by Cynthia Brewer, and I suspect that men and women don't just use colours and textures in a slightly different way, but are also attracted, convinced, and reassured by different colours and textures.

This absolutely makes a difference if you're working on a site that is gender-specific. Using a generic low-saturation palette is going to destroy the appeal of a site with predominantly male customers, while a black/brown/grey/red site will fail with women.

I've always been impressed by Apple's ability to make distinctive designs that bridge the gap and manage to be gender neutral. While most laptops are black and angular, an MBP appears to have no gender distinction of any kind. This is a very cool trick, and much harder to do than it looks.

The point being the target audience matters, and colour is a hard problem in design with a lot of context sensitivity, and certainly not something that can be reduced to simple guidance.

[dmitriid]

Google is absolutely horrible when it comes to graphs in GCP and IIRC analytics. Indistinguishable shades of blue? Yup. Displaying errors with green or blue and displaying other values with red and orange? Yup.

[neop1x]

I don't agree with color selections in the article. In majority of examples, I like "non ideal" better. Their "ideal" ones lack saturation, sometimes there is no enough color difference between the segments and their color palette looks rather depressive, autumn. Sorry, but I think this article is just another copywriter writeup trying to make science from something ordinary.

[ggggtez]

I think the Google example looks better. As someone looking at the chart, I want bold colors that quickly stand out.

Another complain of mine is their statement to use yellow instead of green. But green has the connotation of "good" when paired against red, which it was in their example chart. Using yellow there would change the emotional feeling of the chart, in a way that would make it less understandable.

[watwut]

Realistically, Google is awful in UI design in general.