How much colour a board will actually tolerate
7 April 2026 · Giorgi Kapanadze
Traffic-light dots feel decisive until nobody remembers who set the thresholds. Colour in an executive dashboard has to survive a black-and-white print.
The printer on the ninth floor can hold a turquoise close to the one on this site. We still draw packs as if they might be copied in the basement on a machine that only knows grey. If a bar depends on being green, it will fail in that copy.
Traffic-light dots are the usual request. They are also the usual fight. A red dot without a written threshold is just a mood. We ask to see a minute, or we draw the bar and leave the dot off. Several chairs have been irritated. They have also stopped asking, in the sitting, “is this bad?” because the number is allowed to be the number.
When we do use colour, we use it once per page: the series that is this year, or the series that is cash. The rest sits in silver-grey. Bilingual labels are not a place for colour coding; they are a place for type size.
A practical check: print the page, walk to the window on Rustaveli, and see whether the legend still works. If you need the projector to understand it, it is not a board page. It is a slide.
We keep a small box of rejected proofs. Most of them failed because someone asked for a heat map of the country. Georgia is a real place. It is rarely the subject of the monthly operating pack.