How to Choose Colors for Infographics That Communicate Clearly

An infographic is a visual argument. It takes data, relationships, processes, or comparisons and presents them in a form that communicates faster and more memorably than text or tables alone. Color is not a finishing touch on an infographic — it is load-bearing structure. The right color choices make the argument clear; the wrong ones require the reader to work through visual noise to find the information. Here is how to choose colors that make infographics do their job.

The Three Jobs Color Does in Infographics

Before choosing specific colors, identify which of the three functional color jobs applies to each element of your infographic.

Categorical differentiation: Using color to distinguish between different groups, items, or categories. "Company A is blue, Company B is orange." Color here is an identifier — it must be perceptually distinct between categories and consistent throughout the infographic.

Quantitative encoding: Using color intensity or progression to communicate quantity or magnitude. A heatmap where darker colors represent higher values. A timeline where color saturation increases over time. Color here encodes a continuous variable — it must progress logically and perceptually uniformly.

Emphasis: Using color to direct attention to the most important data point, finding, or conclusion. One bar highlighted in vivid color while the rest are gray. The key statistic shown in a bold brand color while supporting statistics are neutral. Color here is a spotlight — it must be clearly distinct from the surrounding neutral field.

Most infographics use all three jobs, sometimes within the same visual element. A bar chart might use categorical differentiation (different colors for different product lines), quantitative encoding (darker colors for higher values within each category), and emphasis (one bar in a particularly vivid color to highlight the recommended option). Keeping these functions clearly separated — using different visual dimensions for each when possible — prevents color from becoming ambiguous. The data visualization color principles discussed in our article on Color in Data Visualization: How to Make Charts Actually Readable apply directly here.

Building the Infographic Color Palette

An infographic palette has different requirements from a brand palette or a UI palette. It must be immediately legible at small reproduction sizes (infographics are often shared as social media images at reduced resolution), it must work in both digital and print contexts, and it must be color blind safe for the data-carrying elements.

Start with a neutral base: The background and supporting structural elements (dividers, chart axes, grid lines) should be in the neutral palette — white, light gray, or a very pale tint of the brand color. These elements carry no data; they exist to frame the data elements and should not compete with them visually.

Choose a categorical color set: For category-differentiating colors, select three to six colors that are perceptually distinct in both hue and lightness — so they remain distinguishable in grayscale and for color blind viewers. The colors should be at similar saturation levels so that no category appears more prominent than others at equal data importance. Keep saturation at 60-75% rather than full vivid — high saturation colors are harder to distinguish from each other and more fatiguing over a full infographic.

Define emphasis colors: One color — typically your brand primary at full or near-full saturation — reserved exclusively for the most important data point, finding, or call-to-action in the infographic. Everything else defers to this color. When the emphasis color appears, it carries the visual authority of being the only vivid element in an otherwise restrained field.

Build the sequential scale: For any quantitative encoding, build a single-hue sequential scale from very light to full saturation (or dark). A single-hue scale is more perceptually uniform than multi-hue scales and avoids the artifactual boundaries that rainbow color scales produce. We cover sequential color scale selection in depth in our article on From Color Shades to Full Palettes: How to Scale Any Color Correctly.

Color Blind Safety in Infographics

Infographics are frequently shared as images across contexts where you cannot control how they are viewed — on screens, in print, in presentations, in reports. Making the data-carrying color choices safe for color blind viewers is particularly important in this context because you cannot rely on interactivity (hover states, toggles) to provide alternative encoding as you might in a dashboard.

The standard red-green avoidance applies, but infographic color blind safety goes further: ensure that every data category is distinguishable by lightness in addition to hue, so that a grayscale version of the infographic preserves the categorical distinctions. If you are using a sequential color scale for quantitative encoding, choose a scale that is monotonically increasing in lightness (lighter = lower values, darker = higher values) so that the scale works in grayscale.

Test your infographic by desaturating it completely in Photoshop or Figma. If the data categories remain distinguishable in grayscale, the infographic passes the most basic color independence test. Our article on How to Design with Color for Color Blind Users provides additional testing tools and principles.

Typography Color in Infographics

Label text, data values, and annotation text in infographics must be legible against every background color used in the infographic. This is more complex than checking a single text-on-background combination — an infographic with a heatmap has data labels appearing against a range of background colors, from light (low values) to dark (high values), and the label color must pass WCAG contrast against the full range.

Two approaches solve this: use white text with a dark text shadow for labels that must appear across a range of background colors, or define separate light and dark label colors and switch between them based on the background lightness. A simple rule: use dark labels (#1a1a18) when the background lightness is above 50%, and light labels (#f5f3ef) when the background lightness is below 50%. Most modern charting libraries support automatic label color switching based on background lightness.

Matching Infographic Colors to Brand

Branded infographics — for marketing, reports, and content marketing — should connect to the brand palette while respecting the functional requirements of infographic color. The brand primary typically serves as the emphasis color. Brand secondary colors, if they exist and are sufficiently distinct, can serve as categorical colors. Brand neutrals form the background layer.

When the brand palette does not provide enough distinct colors for all categorical needs, extend it using the color wheel relationships covered in our article on How to Use a Color Wheel to Create Perfect Color Harmonies — adding analogous or split-complementary hues to the brand palette's primary colors to create a richer categorical set while maintaining visual coherence with the brand.

Color in infographics serves the data first, the brand second, and the aesthetic last. When those priorities are maintained, the result is an infographic that is both immediately understandable and visually consistent with the brand that produced it — the optimal combination for both communication and credibility.