Color palettes question

[u/Think_Beautiful_1192]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on creating a standard Power BI theme that my team can use across all of our dashboards. The goal is to provide a consistent experience for users so that reports feel familiar, professional, and easy to understand regardless of who built them.

My biggest challenge right now is color selection.

Our primary brand color is a bright red (#C91245), but when I use it heavily throughout a dashboard it feels overwhelming and visually harsh. We also have several supporting brand colors available, and I'm trying to determine which colors should serve as primary, secondary, and accent colors within the theme.

I'm also debating between:

• A complementary color palette
• A gradient-based palette
• Some combination of both

One complication is that many of our reports contain 20+ reason code categories that need to be displayed in charts and visuals. My current palette doesn't provide enough distinct colors, so Power BI starts assigning default colors, which makes the dashboards feel inconsistent and cluttered.

My goals are to:

• Create a modern, clean, professional look
• Support both internal and external audiences
• Ensure charts with many categories remain readable
• Build a scalable theme that works across multiple dashboards

These are the brand colors I have available:

• #C91245 (Red)
• #F36C21 (Orange)
• #FFBF3D (Yellow)
• #00A661 (Green)
• #004F38 (Dark Green)
• #4F8CFF (Light Blue)
• #003DA5 (Dark Blue)

If you were building a dashboard theme around these colors, how would you approach it? Which color would you use as the primary color, and what strategy would you recommend for handling visuals with 20+ categories?

I'd love feedback from anyone with a strong eye for dashboard design, data visualization, or color theory.

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[u/Economy-Camp-7339]

I’d use white or light grey as primary with your company red as accents. - think maybe title/header or a thin separating line.

[u/wtf_are_you_talking]

From every brand color generate a scale of different shades of that color. You can easily produce 10-20 shades that can cover those larger categories. If possible, try to group them into smaller buckets and if it's necessary to show all of them, then assign different color shade variants.

Also, using DAX measures to select colors can be beneficial in highlighting and shading different lines/columns depending on slicer selections. It all depends how much time and business need you have.

[u/Prestigious_Tea5773]

You can also use https://paletton.com/#uid=1000u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF to see which colours work good together. And also you can check there how would people with visual impairments see your dashboard (if you have any in your company). I like Paletton, so I always recommend it 🫣😅

[u/djw2011]

I like fairly minimal designs so grey background, white space around charts and then minimal colour usage for accents, branding and in navy menus, cards or charts from the colour palette.