Most companies have one or two brand colours, not eight. A report needs eight that work together on a chart. Report Design Studio has two ways to get there: build a palette from one colour with colour harmony, or pull one out of an image.
Pick your base colour
Open Harmony in Report Design Studio. Set the base colour, the one everything is built from: use the swatch, type your brand's hex code, or press the button next to it for a random start.
Switch the preview between Light and Dark here too, since the same rule gives different colours for each mode.
Apply a harmony rule
Click a rule to generate a palette from your base and apply it at once:
| Rule | What it makes |
|---|---|
| Neighbours | Colours next to your base on the colour wheel. Calm and close |
| Opposites | Your base and its opposite. Strong contrast between series |
| Triad | Three colours evenly spaced around the wheel |
| Quad | Four colours evenly spaced |
| Split | Your base and the two neighbours of its opposite |
| Single hue | Shades of your base only |
The studio spreads the colours in even steps of perceived lightness, so the palette reads balanced whatever your base hue. It also keeps every colour at a contrast of at least 3:1 against the visual's background, the minimum for chart marks.
For most reports, Opposites or Split gives distinct series while still feeling like your brand. Single hue suits a report where the colours encode order, not categories.
Pull colours from a logo or photo
Open Extract and drop an image onto it, or click to upload one: a PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF up to 10 MB. The studio pulls out the dominant colours and shows them under the image; Use this palette applies them. Use ✕ to remove the image and try another.
The image is read in your browser and never uploaded.
Clean up what you extracted
A logo rarely has eight chart-ready colours. Expect to:
- Remove near-white and near-black colours taken from the background
- Replace two colours that look alike
- Add colours if the logo has only two or three
The next lesson, Build, is where you make those edits. A good trick: take your logo's main colour from Extract, then put it into Harmony as the base.
Check before you move on
Generated palettes are balanced, not perfect. Look at the first three colours on the preview, and run the checks in A11y (a later lesson) before you export.
The next lesson edits a palette colour by colour, and builds ramps for conditional formatting.