Swiss Party Colors

Worked with

Arne Haeger, Daniel Fischer

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Those who make data visualizations in the political field sooner or later want to color things by party, but in doing so a wide variety of things have to be taken into account: Viewers must already associate party and color with each other, the colors must be clearly distinguishable from each other, they must be well readable in many different contexts and furthermore look good when combined. Oh, have I already mentioned that there are about 50 different political parties in Switzerland?

For SRF I have addressed this issue and defined colours for all parties that appear in our news coverage. These are now used in all visualizations (online and on television). I then published the color codes as Creative Commons in a spreadsheet, a Github repo and as an NPM package. Various Swiss media outlets (including the Tagesanzeiger and the Republik) have since adopted the colors for their visualizations. I have also documented and written about the working process in detail:
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