How we designed an accessible color palette from scratch

How we designed an accessible color palette from scratch

摘要

We knew that, although meticulously crafted, our current 7-color design system (in other words, our secondary branding colors) was very limiting and not suited for all use cases. So when data visualization discussions came up in October 2021, we realized we needed to create a new color palette that was distinct from the existing one — one that was specifically made and thought out for this usage. And as we were going to be building it from scratch, we took advantage of this opportunity to make sure it would fit the accessibility best practices as much as possible. It was indeed important for us that the 4.5% of the worldwide population affected by color blindness, including deuteranomaly (aka green-weak), deuteranopia (aka green-blind), protanomaly (aka red-weak), and protanopia (aka red-blind), could see most of our color palette. Here, we detail the steps we followed to build this accessible color palette designed specifically for data visualization.