Every default chart palette in every spreadsheet tool has pairs that collapse for color blind readers. This one does not — and the reason it works is not the hues, it is that the five colors run from near-white to near-black.
The Palette
| Series | Hex | RGB | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
Series 1 | #FCE7F3 | 252, 231, 243 | Near-white pink |
Series 2 | #EAB308 | 234, 179, 8 | Mid yellow |
Series 3 | #3B82F6 | 59, 130, 246 | Mid blue |
Series 4 | #14532D | 20, 83, 45 | Dark green |
Series 5 | #0F172A | 15, 23, 42 | Near-black navy |
All ten pairs were checked under protanopia, protanomaly, deuteranopia, deuteranomaly, tritanopia, tritanomaly and achromatopsia. The tightest pair sits at ΔE 20.7 — above the threshold where colors start reading as the same. You can re-run any pair yourself in our color pair checker.
Why It Looks Like That
It is a fair first reaction that this does not look like a chart palette. A near-white, a yellow, a blue, a dark green and a near-black is not what the default swatches in your tool offer.
That spread is exactly why it works. Color vision deficiency destroys hue separation and leaves lightness intact. A palette that must stay readable for everyone is therefore forced to separate on lightness — so it ends up as a light-to-dark ladder that happens to carry hues, rather than a ring of equally bright colors.
It also means these charts survive black-and-white printing, photocopying, e-ink, cheap projectors and a phone screen in sunlight. Those are the same problem wearing different clothes.
Five is not an arbitrary number. Searching a 90-color pool over 4,000 randomised orderings for the largest set where every pair stays distinct under every vision type returns five. If your chart needs eight categories, no palette will rescue it — you need direct labels, patterns or marker shapes instead.
Applying It
Microsoft Excel
- Click a data series in your chart to select it, then click again to select just that series.
- Open Format Data Series → Fill & Line → Fill → Solid fill.
- Open the Color dropdown and choose More Colors → Custom.
- Enter the hex value directly in the Hex field, or switch to RGB and type the three numbers.
- Repeat per series. To reuse it, save the workbook as a template (
.xltx) so the palette comes with every new chart.
Google Sheets
- Double-click the chart to open the Chart editor, then go to Customize → Series.
- Pick the series from the dropdown, then open Fill color → Custom.
- Paste the hex code including the
#and press Enter. - Custom colors you enter are remembered in that spreadsheet, so the rest of the series are one click each after the first pass.
Tableau
- For a one-off: click the Color card → Edit Colors, select each data item and assign a custom color by hex.
- For something reusable, add a custom palette to your
Preferences.tpsfile in the My Tableau Repository folder, using a<color-palette type="regular">block with these five hex values, then restart Tableau. - The palette then appears by name in the Edit Colors dropdown for every workbook.
Do one more thing. Whatever the palette, add a second cue: label lines directly instead of relying on a legend, vary marker shapes on scatter plots, or use dashed and dotted line styles. Color that is backed up by a shape survives everything.
If You Need a Gradient Instead
This palette is categorical — five separate things with no order between them. If your color encodes a quantity, such as a heat map or a conditional-formatting scale, you want a continuous ramp instead, and the rules are different: what matters is that lightness climbs steadily from one end to the other. Our colormap generator builds those and scores them, and our chart colors guide covers the wider design decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why not just use the built-in colorblind-safe palette?
Use it if your tool has one — Tableau ships a Color Blind palette and it is a reasonable default. The value in a verified list is that you know exactly which vision types were tested and how much margin each pair has, rather than trusting a label. Run whichever palette you use through a pair checker and you will know where it stands.
Can I use more than five colors?
You can, but they will not all stay distinguishable. Five is the maximum found by searching a 90-color pool for a set where every pair survives every vision type. Beyond that, add a second visual cue — direct labels, patterns, marker shapes — rather than hunting for a sixth colour.
These colors look washed out compared to the defaults. Is that necessary?
The spread from near-white to near-black is what makes the palette work, because lightness is the one channel colour vision deficiency leaves intact. You can substitute hues freely as long as you keep the lightness spacing; what you cannot do is make all five equally bright and vivid.
Do these work for printing in black and white?
Yes, and that is a direct consequence rather than a coincidence. A palette separated by lightness converts to distinct greys, which is the same requirement achromatopsia imposes. Greyscale printing, photocopies and e-ink all benefit.
What about conditional formatting color scales?
Those encode a quantity, not categories, so they need a continuous ramp whose lightness climbs steadily rather than a set of separate colours. Avoid the red-to-green scale that spreadsheets offer by default — it fails on both counts. A colormap generator is the right tool for that job.
How do I check a palette I already have?
Test the pairs. Our colour pair checker reports the perceptual distance between any two colours under all eight vision types, so you can work through the combinations that actually appear next to each other in your chart and find out which ones fail.
Check Your Existing Palette
Every figure here came from the same tools. Test any two colors, or build a continuous scale for heat maps.
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