Field Note
When black-and-white printing beats colour dashboards
Warehouse printers ignore your carefully chosen blues. Design for the copy that actually hangs on the wall.
A Johor plant asked for “more vibrant” returns charts. Their supervisors printed every page on a tired mono A3 unit near the loading bay. Vibrant became grey mush.
We rebuilt with length, position, and labels doing the work. Small multiples replaced a rainbow map. The wall copy suddenly matched the laptop version, which meant the morning huddle could point at the same bar without squinting.
Colour still helps in projected boardrooms. Ask where the chart will live before you open the palette panel.