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Viva Magenta: diverging with waterfall
Creating a Color Scheme with the 2023 Pantone Color of the Year and its Complement
In this writing, I discuss a method to create a diverging color scheme for data visualization using the 2023 Pantone Color of the Year. A diverging color scheme fuses two sequential color schemes, each with different hues, together with a shared neutral midpoint color. Here, I combine the 2023 Pantone Color of the Year, the corresponding Pantone complementary color, and a White midpoint to achieve these results. Let’s start by exploring the 2023 Pantone Color of the Year and the concept of complementary color harmony.
The 2023 Pantone Color of the Year:
On December 1, 2022, Viva Magenta (Pantone 18–1750) was announced as the 2023 Pantone Color of the Year. Pantone’s Color of the Year influences the development of products and consumer decisions in areas like graphic design, product packaging, fashion, industrial design, and home furnishings. As a result, I like to build and keep in inventory color schemes that correspond to the designated Pantone Color of the Year.
When working with digital color, it is helpful to know the Hex code that corresponds to Viva Magenta (Pantone 18–1750). For those unfamiliar with the concept, a color Hex code is a hexadecimal way to represent a color in RGB format by combining amounts of Red, Green, and Blue to note that specific color. A Google search on “viva magenta hex code” yields the following result: #BE3455.
Pantone provides a resource called Pantone Connect to explore their library of colors. The free version of Pantone Connect is very limited since Pantone hopes you will subscribe to its paid subscription services. Pantone Connect tends to work best with the Chrome web browser. I have found several hang ups using Safari. Fortunately, for the Pantone Color of the Year, data about the hex code and color harmonies are provided. I used the free version of the Pantone Connect tool to verify the official Pantone result was the same as the Google search. In the next section of this writing, I will…
