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Biggest Flaw In Dashboards with Dark Colors

About this Tutorial

An optical illusion in Google Sheets and how to fix it.

Video Transcript

 Hi. So in a couple of other videos I talk about how to do this really cool way to make sort of beautiful dashboards or information where you have these gaps. Now you're gonna run into one of the biggest flaws in dashboards with dark colors is that it becomes an optical illusion. I'm not sure if it's happening for you right now, but if you go and recreate this, At least for me, right at this moment, there are gray dots in between all of these corners.

It's an optical illusion. And here's a couple ways to fix that. So one thing you can do is you can spread out these cells more. You might think, okay, let's just make this let's do resize column. Let's do 300. . And you might, you might do something like this. Let's do that again. But the problem with this is that as you elongate them, the, the, the corner still create that optical illusion.

What you really need to do is increase the size and spread 'em and spread across the gap in here. So we can do that here. Gimme size column. Let's do, try 50. And it does it a little bit. , like I, I can sort of still see a grade op, but not really. And let's do that one more time. Let's resize it to 75.

And that's a lot better there. There's almost, I don't see any illusion there. That's one way you can, so now your, your, each of your cells gain a little bit more room, give it a little more waste. Makes it like, like a not lot, a lot nicer, and also get rid of that optical. One other way, which sounds like it's gonna take a lot of time, but doesn't really, is you can reverse the colors.

So instead of using a bright color for the cell that you want to have that information in, you can use sort of a let's go with that lower green. And then what we want to do is take this green and put it here. Let's put it all here. And this doesn't actually take too, too long to do cause you can actually get all these columns.

You can get all of here. And once we do this we can copy and paste this column. This is also one of the reasons why I delete a lot of the cells, sorry, not cells, the rows. I delete a lot of rows when I. Start a sheet so we don't get lost. We can do it now there. And now we want to get this. And so now we can just copy that entire column and we can do the design before we put in the data.

Actually, let's copy both of these and do it twice as fast. And then we want just this.  for all these. And now we don't really have the exact same optical illusion, but we do run into sort of the opposite wire now instead of a gray darker dot. It's a whiter dot. So again, we're gonna have to do something drastic, which is we wanna make the shading just a little bit different.

So as we go here, let's do one more.  and we still have our cells different and they still stand out, but now everything is darker. And it makes it a little different design. But we do get sort of rid of that optical illusion a little bit. Okay. But it is still bothering me. So we probably just want to give that a gap of one meaning the difference between these two style of colors.

For one. So this makes a very interesting dashboard where now the contrast between the cell and the background is difference of only one space here. It actually gets a lot easier if you do custom colors. You can get them a little bit closer or just, just a tiny hair apartment. But this makes a really interesting dashboard that gets out of that optical illusion.

And then the last way is you can combine. Cells or make the gap way, way, way tinier. I'll show you that in just a hot second. So what we're gonna do is we want to make this gap very, very tiny.

So we can do is right click resize row, let's make it two pixels.

And it's almost imperceptible because you can also use a border. , but sometimes you do want to use a row.

Let's make this gap a little bit bigger here. And then these rows weigh, if you get rid of this gap to the, to the right and the. And then you make the vertical a little bit different size a lot smaller. That also gets rid of the illusion here. There's no illusion here. There's an illusion here. You can sort of see a gray here.

And then what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna show you what it looks like with a border that we're just gonna delete these gaps. Now. We enter the border, we can use, let's use, let's just make that border really

So we're gonna do it like that and make it really thick.

And now we don't have any illusion around the.  cells like in between the gaps here because there's no corners. But we still have this gap to, to separate data and give it a little bit of space and separation as we go into here. And these dashboards can look really cool with these internal borders that are a different color than what you would normally do.

And then the last thing you can do is increase the darkness of the background, which I use the paper FB FB F eight highlight. And then I put the green as the lowest possible. Here at the top of this pastel, and that pretty much gets rid of that optical illusion as well. So really in dashboards you want to use dark colors, you're gonna get this optical illusion.

One of the best ways you can deal with it is not to use dark colors, but I've given you at least a couple of interesting workarounds you can do is by maybe reversing the color, you can spread it out a little bit to get rid of that gray dot. Killing my eyes and then getting tiny gaps or even using borders here instead of larger gaps or exact gaps.

And hopefully that helps you make really cool. Not optical illusion dashboards, unless you want to create an optical illusion to make people squint and go, oh, this is weird. But hopefully you don't want to do that. Hopefully you want to come, come across as having good information in your dashboards and you wanna like show people the right information at the right.

And not hurt their eyes. Thanks.

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