The palette is the part of a theme people notice first, and the part that most often goes wrong: colours that look alike, a series nobody can see on the background, a rainbow that shouts. This lesson shows how to find a good palette quickly and how to tell a good one from a pretty one.
Filter the palettes
Open Palettes in Report Design Studio. Two filters narrow the grid:
| Filter | Choices |
|---|---|
| Category | All, Colour-blind-safe, Dark, Light, Corporate, Colourful, Pastel |
| Style | All Styles, Ocean, Urban Night, Nature, Bold Energy, Professional, Creative |
Combine them: Corporate with Professional gives sober business palettes like Executive Navy or Business Teal; Dark with Urban Night gives palettes made for dark reports.
Start from a reference set
The Colour-blind-safe category holds palettes designed by colour scientists to stay distinct for people with colour vision deficiencies:
- Okabe–Ito (CUD), the colour universal design set
- Paul Tol · Muted and Paul Tol · Vibrant
- ColorBrewer · Set2 and ColorBrewer · Dark2
For a report many people will read, these are the safest start. You can still change single colours later.
Bookmark the candidates
Click the ★ on a palette to bookmark it. Tick Bookmarked only to see just those, and compare them one by one on the preview. The checkmark shows the palette in use.
Judge a palette on the preview
A palette that looks good as a row of swatches can fail on a chart. Check on the preview:
- The first two or three colours do most of the work, because most charts have few series. They must be clearly different
- Every colour is visible on the background of the visual. Pale colours vanish on white; dark ones on a dark report
- Nothing shouts by accident. One bright colour among muted ones draws the eye, which is good for a highlight and bad for an ordinary series
Liked the one before? Undo above the preview goes back to it, and Redo forward again.
Match the report's mode
A palette in the Dark category is made for dark reports; Light and Pastel for white pages. Switch the preview to the mode you will use before judging. The studio adapts a palette's colours to the mode to keep them readable, but a palette designed for that mode usually needs fewer changes.
Copy the colours
Copy all, at the end of the colour strip above the preview, copies every hex code, handy for a style guide or for colouring something outside Power BI in the same palette.
The next lesson makes a palette of your own from a single colour or from your logo.