# What are colour palettes and how do I use them?

> A palette is an ordered set of colours applied to your series in turn. FigmaCharts ships 28 — nine of its own and 19 that match design systems and charting libraries you may already use — and you can build your own.

> **Tip:** Order matters. The first colour goes to the first series, so put your most important colour first rather than relying on the reader to work out the emphasis.

> **Note:** A palette with fewer colours than you have series will repeat. If two series end up the same colour, add more swatches rather than reordering the data.

## Steps

1. Open the Colour palette picker in the Appearance group.
2. The built-in palettes cover the common moods: Ocean, Forest, Sunset, Monochrome, Vibrant, Corporate and Pastel, alongside the FigmaCharts default and a Google-styled set.
3. Six match design systems your engineers may already use — Material, Tailwind, Ant Design, Atlassian, IBM Carbon and Bootstrap. Two are the classic analysis palettes, Tableau and D3 Set2, and two more are D3's pastels.
4. The remaining nine are the charting libraries' own: Highcharts, Highcharts Brand and Highcharts Dark; Nivo, Nivo Category10 and Nivo Spectral; ECharts, ECharts Macarons and ECharts Vintage. Picking one makes a chart look like that library's default, which is useful when you are matching something already in production.
5. To make your own, open the presets manager, go to Palettes and press New palette, then edit the swatches. Palettes you save are available to every chart in the file.

_Topics: palette, colours, design system_

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Install Figma Charts: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1345221583582136577/figma-charts

More Figma Charts help: https://systergon.com/figma-charts/help