What you’ll learn
How to use color more intentionally in four simple prompts.
Color is the most powerful tool in data visualization — and often underused. The right palette makes a chart instantly readable; the wrong one creates confusion, breaks brand guidelines, and falls apart in dark mode.
These four prompts use the Flourish Assistant to take color from an afterthought to a deliberate storytelling decision.
Define color overrides for specific categories
Custom color overrides lock a color to a category, so it stays put no matter how your data changes. That matters most when the category has a color people already know. Here, we've mapped Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google to their brand colors, without you touching a single setting.
Set META, AMAZON, APPLE, NETFLIX, and GOOGLE to their prominent brand colors.
Set a highlight color
Fade everything else to gray, and your eye goes straight to what's colored. It’s one of the most effective ways to direct attention in a chart. Here, Netflix and Meta keep their brand colors while Apple, Amazon, and Google settle into the background. Suddenly there's no question which two stocks this chart is about. You don't lose the rest of the story, it's just no longer competing for attention.
Highlight Netflix and Meta while maintaining brand colors.
Add a color highlight to your title or subtitle
Flourish supports HTML markup in titles, including the <mark> tag, which wraps a word or phrase in a colored highlight directly in the headline. With Netflix and Meta highlighted, your readers already know whose colors to look for, before they even reach the chart. This works for any keyword worth calling out.
Highlight Netflix and Meta in the title using <mark>, with each highlight matching the brand color and maintaining good text contrast.
Adjust colors for dark mode
Switching a chart to dark mode isn't just changing the background – it requires rethinking every color in the chart. Text needs to be light, series colors need enough contrast against a dark surface, and subtle greys that read fine on white become invisible on black. These prompts handle the full set of changes in one instruction.
The same works in reverse: if your chart has a dark background, you can ask the Assistant to switch it to light mode.
Adjust this chart for dark mode.
Ready to try for yourself?
Open any chart in the Flourish editor and paste one of the prompts above into the Assistant. They work across all visualization types, so you don’t need to use the example chart. Start with the first prompt to lock in your colors using overrides, then work through the rest to get a chart where every color is doing deliberate work.
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