Customisation of colour palettes

[jl5000]

Are there any plans to generalise this package for OGDs so people can easily use their own colour palettes? A lot of good work has gone into this, I imagine we could use it across Gov if we could allow palette customisation.

[Olivia-Box-Power]

Hi Jamie. We've had conversations around this and at the moment we've decided not to. The reason being

1. One of the package maintainers would need to check that the suggested colour palette was accessible. This could be time consuming if lots of colour palettes are added.
2. The person in the OGD who suggests the colour palette may leave their role. We may not be informed if the department decides to change the colours it uses.
3. Is there much benefit in each department coming up with its own colour palette. In DHSC the policy is to use the AF colour palette. The AF colour palette sets a common standard.

We're very keen for afcharts to be used across GOV. We want to avoid departments making their own chart package, as the whole aim of afcharts is to do this work once for the whole CS.

Happy to have further conversations though if you have specific reason why you need a departmental colour palette.

[jl5000]

Hi Olivia. We have our own branding colour palette (I won't say who on here, but you will see my response on the XGov Slack channel). I imagine this will be true of many organisations/departments.

If I may push back on points 1+2...I wasn't suggesting embedding all colour palettes in the package itself, rather allowing people to override the defaults, for example as an argument to use_afcharts(). It would be reasonable to leave the appropriateness of those palettes to the people using them.

[Olivia-Box-Power]

Thanks @jl5000. We're going to do some thinking about this at our next meeting and decide the best approach.