A color palette can make or break your visualization, a carefully chosen palette can immediately harness

the pre-attentive processing capabilities of the viewer. A poorly chosen palette can obscure even the
most evident information to even the most attentive audience. The process of color selection has no
preset guidelines, they are open to interpretation based on the scenario and colors hold unintended
significance based on people and culture.

Color Saturation spectrum:

Saturation spectrum is the intensity of the color across the visualization or dashboard. It denotes the
intensity, significance or dominance of an attribute and is not muted by other colors in the
visualizations.

While a standard rainbow color/hue palette can help denote 7 levels of diversity of a dataset, adding
saturation of varying scales can expand the diversity of representation of the data points or visually
separable patterns. Lowering or increasing the intensity or contrast of the colors can alleviate and
aggravate the importance of an attribute for the audience’s perception.

Saturation can overcome the drawbacks of a diverse color palette which encompasses
misrepresentation or misguiding a viewer’s interpretation. Saturation mechanisms in human vision are
more perceptible and sensitive to frequency variations in spatial distributions. Saturation variance of
color scales can replicate the effect of having uniform step-wise representation in data more
adequately.

Hue Saturation also helps to avoid hue changes on overlapping regions of datapoints which could
change the meaning of the data under perception and helps in maintaining the true definition of the
same. Unlike bright colors high saturation of visually pleasing colors on a visualization is proven to be
quicker in catching the user’s attention.