: Innovative ways to make a flowchart stand out? Following my question here, I am wondering what are some innovative ways of making different aspects of a complex flowchart standout. By aspects,

@Yeniel278

Just a few ideas from my own experience:


Filled boxes with white text, vs outline boxes with dark text;
Where you wish to emphasise some boxes over others, try reducing the
colour saturation of the chart as a whole to zero, and increase the
overall brightness, so that it appears as monochrome faded grey.
Then use this as a background, and superimpose unfaded, fully
coloured boxes over the top for those items you wish to emphasise;
A variation on the above, would be to use (manual) colour
'sub-palettes', so that different groups of boxes are picked out at
different levels of colour saturation. This has been used to great
effect in Air Traffic Control, with a background in shades of grey, a
main layer of boxes in pastel shades, leaving the ability to pick out
special cases with bright coloured boxes;
Smallish variations in the size of both a box and the text within it,
may help;
Try a pale filled shape that covers an area surrounding all of the
boxes you wish to emphasise, but stacked -behind- these boxes so it
doesn't obscure them, but is still visible around their edges. This
effect will work better if this background shape has broad rounded
corners that also contrast with pointed corners on the boxes
overlaying it;
Try small coloured insets in your boxes, appearing as a thickened
(but colour keyed) line on one side of each box. You can then use the
choice of which line to 'thicken' to indicate which group the box
belongs to;
If you have them or can buy them, you might also try some filters such as those by
Alien Skin, but if you do so, take care not to overdo it, as
different styles may clash. Best to go for one of the simpler
styles, and contrast this with unstyled boxes.


As a more general point, you might try choosing styles, colours and shapes that have some contextual meaning. This will not completely obviate the need to provide a key swatch, but it may help to make reading your charts more intuitive or more memorable.

Regards,

Marianne.

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