How to add custom colors and thresholds to your map and legend

When using binned or linear coloring, you can manually set bins or thresholds for your colors and your legend.

1

Sequential and diverging colors

Go to the colors settings within the Regions layer settings and select Numeric to be your scale type. You can also select whether you would like your legend to be sequential or diverging.



• A sequential palette ranges between two colors (typically having one “main” color) ranging from white or a lighter shade to a darker one, by varying one or more of the parameters in the HSV/HSL color space. 
• A diverging palette ranges between three or more colors, usually between two contrasting colors at either end with a neutral color or white in the middle separating the two. Diverging palettes should only be used when there is a value of importance around which the data are to be compared. This could be to mark whether something is positive or negative, for example.

2

For linear coloring

By default, your gradient will default to the the  minimum in your data and the maximum in your data.

If you want to change where your color scale goes from and to, you can do this by setting a Custom domain. If you don't set a Legend min and a Legend max in the Legend settings, your legend will also display between the min and max set in the Custom domain settings.



Under "Palette" > "Custom", you can select to add custom minimum, mid-point (when using a diverging scale), and maximum colors for your gradient. 



If you would like to configure the minimum and maximum values displayed in your legend, you can do that by setting a custom legend in the Legend settings.



In some cases, you might want to have a different min and max in your domain than in your legend to color everything above a certain value a certain color. Take this example:

In this example, the domain is set to have a min of 0 and a max of 400, but the legend is set to have a min of 0 and a max of 600. This results in the legend showing 0 to 600, but from 400 onwards, the same dark blue at the top of the scale is used.

3

For binned coloring

In addition to selecting how many bins you would like to split your data into, you can also choose from three different binning settings.



• Fixed-width binning creates a certain amount of bins with the same width within the legend. You can select how many bins should be created in the "Number of bins" setting.
• Quantile binning aims to assign the same number of observations to each bin. You can select how many bins should be created in the "Number of bins" setting.
• Custom binning lets you create your own thresholds and however many bins you would like. You can supply your thresholds separated by a semicolon like this: "40; 100; 400". 

You can customize the labeling of your bins in the Legend > Region Color Legend settings.



You have three options:

• Thresholds: This option will aim to display the labels of your bins on their thresholds. If labels would overlap, they are not displayed.
• Centers: This option will aim to display the labels of your bins on their centers.  If labels would overlap, they are not displayed.
• Custom: This option allows you to input custom labels for your bins. You can supply your labels separated by a semicolon like this: "40; 100; 400".  If labels would overlap, they are not displayed.

4

When visualizing multiple columns of data

When visualizing multiple columns of data, you might be showing two entirely separate datasets with different magnitudes. 

By default, Flourish will use the same scale across all columns. This means that they will all be colored by the same min and max in your legend. This is useful if you would like to be able to compare the different columns of data. 

If you are visualizing multiple columns across different scales, magnitudes or units, you might want to base the scale on the currently selected column instead. You can set this in the Regions > Base default scale on setting.