Colors

Colors: as sparingly as possible!

As the sheet-music example in the previous post shows, depending on context, colors are not necessary to convey essential information. Unfortunately, the option to use color is applied far too often and in the wrong context. Reporting — internal reporting in particular — is not a marketing brochure and should not look like one. Reporting is about the unbiased, clear, and unambiguous communication of business-critical information.

(Many) colors are therefore simply not needed in internal reporting. In general, IBCS recommends focusing on the essentials: everything that is irrelevant to conveying the information should be dropped, because it can distort the view of what matters.

Red is usually used for negative variances and green for positive ones — where positive and negative may carry inverted plus/minus signs depending on context.

And since unambiguity is an important and sensible rule — see also pattern recognition — these two colors should not be used for anything else.

Not even if the corporate design features red or green. Coloring structure bars or time-series charts in one of these colors, for example, would then be off-limits.

When choosing red and green, we should also think of people living with red-green color vision deficiency who cannot distinguish these colors well.

The BinoBI Workbench takes this into account, by the way, and has chosen an appropriate shade of green.