Adam Aspin (2/26/2009)
Thanks to both of you for this one - this is a very good idea that I have not covered it in this way in the following articles so would one of you like to post this as an addition to this "mini-series" to extend the tips and techniques offered?
I've not put it into action yet.
Coincidently It was yesterday when I was looking at methods of maintaining consistant colouring when using graphs. I ended up creating some tables and associating colours with categories so when several graphs/charts are on the same report the same category e.g. "bikes" will always be shown using the same colour e.g. "red". Then one legend can be used for several charts.
The concept should be farly easy to extend to other report properties.
Image locations for branding
fonts, font colors, weights etc... for consistant titleing
colour schemes
The final adaptation ties in with using dynamic colours for graphs i.e. using hex values rather than the names for the colours.
Doing it this way gives an option for starting with a base colour - defined as a hex value, then adding or subtracting to the RGB components to give a spread of colours from the base colour
PS. If you're benched at the moment then you've probably got a lot more time than me to work on an article 😉