Using Colors in Process Diagrams – From Color Theory to Automated Coloring Support

Process diagrams as a means to visualize or model dynamic aspects (e.g. work practices or business processes) of an organization can be considered a common practice in modern organizations. While shape and orientation of graphical elements in process diagrams are largely prescribed by the modeling notation (and the implementation of this standard in the software tool) the actual color, texture, size and position of elements is left to the (often unskilled) hands of a modeler. Similarly state-of-theart process modeling tools offer only very limited guidance for a modeler in choosing colors that are aesthetically pleasing and at the same time facilitate readability and understandability of process diagrams. In this paper, we present an approach that takes into account the aspects a process diagram reflects to derive aesthetically pleasing sets of colors to be applied to diagram elements. Finally, we describe the exemplary implementation of this approach in an assistive color selection feature in a process modeling environment.