Inspired by Richard Hier's theme contribution, and my admiration for Stephen Few's writings on data visualisation, here is my variation on Richard's work. In my 2004 edition of Show Me The Numbers, the color palettes are described on pages 108-109.
I preferenced the "Medium" palette that Richard created, for a few reasons:
- Power BI's automatic color assignment and manual color picker are biased towards lighter tints (starting from the theme colors)
- Visuals with text labels inside colored areas (e.g. TreeMap, data labels for bar or column charts) work better with bold colors and white fonts (IMO).
I dropped the grey colors, as 10 shades of grey are always available from the Power BI color picker. I also prefer to reserve grey to manually assign to categories like "Unspecified", "Unknown", "N/A" etc.
Personally I'm not a fan of using red (emotional trigger for some), but Stephen Few has red, so I left it in.
I dropped all the visualstyles nodes in the json theme file. I don't like it when I try a theme on an existing report and it messes with legend layouts etc - best left as default or as specified for particular page layouts IMO.
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