Metadata
Title
Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization
Category
general
UUID
3b8abe9ebbf1452aa589fb5b62731e85
Source URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers/semantically-resonant-colors
Parent URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers
Crawl Time
2026-03-11T03:17:30+00:00
Rendered Raw Markdown 
# Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization

**Source**: https://idl.uw.edu/papers/semantically-resonant-colors
**Parent**: https://idl.uw.edu/papers

[Sharon Lin](http://graphics.stanford.edu/~sharonl/), Julie Fortuna, Chinmay Kulkarni, [Maureen Stone](https://mcstone.github.io/), [Jeffrey Heer](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/).
Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. EuroVis), 2013

[Sharon Lin](http://graphics.stanford.edu/~sharonl/), Julie Fortuna, Chinmay Kulkarni, [Maureen Stone](https://mcstone.github.io/), [Jeffrey Heer](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/)

Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. EuroVis), 2013

 

Bar charts depicting fictional fruit sales, each using the same backing color palette. The chart on the left uses our semantically-resonant assignment algorithm to pick colors that are representative of the data values. The chart on the right uses a default assignment that does not take color-concept associations into account.

Materials

[PDF](https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2013-SemanticColor-EuroVis.pdf) | Best Paper Award

Abstract

We introduce an algorithm for automatic selection of semantically-resonant colors to represent data (e.g., using blue for data about "oceans", or pink for "love"). Given a set of categorical values and a target color palette, our algorithm matches each data value with a unique color. Values are mapped to colors by collecting representative images, analyzing image color distributions to determine value-color affinity scores, and choosing an optimal assignment. Our affinity score balances the probability of a color with how well it discriminates among data values. A controlled study shows that expert-chosen semantically-resonant colors improve speed on chart reading tasks compared to a standard palette, and that our algorithm selects colors that lead to similar gains. A second study verifies that our algorithm effectively selects colors across a variety of data categories.

BibTeX

```
@article{2013-semantically-resonant-colors,
  title = {Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization},
  author = {Lin, Sharon AND Fortuna, Julie AND Kulkarni, Chinmay AND Stone, Maureen AND Heer, Jeffrey},
  journal = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. EuroVis)},
  year = {2013},
  url = {https://idl.uw.edu/papers/semantically-resonant-colors},
  doi = {10.1111/cgf.12127}
}
```

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