How do you create a charting palette so that users with color blindness can differentiate all the colors from each other?

One of my favorite customer quotes is that the existing pastel palette looks like “clown sprinkles”. What if we could create a better palette that’s also accessible?

There’s only so much “space” in the color wheel to differentiate colors, especially when taking color blindness into account.

I was able to create 12-color palettes that maximized color-blindness accessibility both for charts that use large blocks of color (e.g. bar) as well as line charts.

I was the sole designer on this project, but I couldn’t have done it without the scientific research-based open source tools to evaluate palettes.

Colors are very subjective, so while not everyone loved every palette, after they understood the process and methodology, they were sold on the result.