ColorCook: Augmenting Color Design for Dashboarding with Domain-Associated Palettes

Abstract

Visualization dashboards serve as an information presentation that uses a tiled layout of key metrics visualized in charts for collaborative decision-making. Existing work has developed tools and techniques for computational color design. Much of these efforts have focused on selecting effective color palettes for independent charts while few attempts have been made to support the expressive color design of multiple coordinated charts in dashboards. In this work, we describe ColorCook, an interactive system that helps design expressive and effective dashboard colorings using domain-associated palettes. ColorCook employs an integrated color workflow for dashboarding, consisting of color selection, assignment, and adjustment. We evaluated ColorCook through a crowdsourcing experiment and a user study. The results of our evaluation indicated that ColorCook is useful for effective and expressive color design.