Charts - Styling

This page groups topics about charts customization.

Colors

Series color

Series accepts a property color which is the base color used to render its components.

<LineChart series={[{ ..., color: '#fdb462'}]} />

Color palette

Charts come with built-in color palettes to automatically assign colors to series. If a particular series lacks a color prop, the chart will default to assigning a color based on the series' index.

You can set a custom color palette by using the prop colors on chart components (or <ChartContainer /> if you are using composition). This prop takes an array of colors, or callback whose input is the theme's mode ('dark' or 'light') and returns the array of colors.

Provided palettes

The library includes three palettes.

Custom palettes

Those palettes can also be generated by using d3-scale-chromatic. Or any color manipulation library you like.

Here is an example of the d3 Categorical color palette.

Values color

Colors can also be set according to item values using the colorMap property of the corresponding axis.

Learn more about how to use this feature with each chart component in their dedicated docs section:

• bar charts
• line charts
• scatter charts

The colorMap property can accept three kinds of objects defined below.

Piecewise color map

The piecewise configuration takes an array of n thresholds values and n+1 colors.

{
  type: 'piecewise';
  thresholds: Value[];
  colors: string[];
}

Continuous color map

The continuous configuration lets you map values from min to max properties to their corresponding colors.

The color property can either be an array of two colors to interpolate, or an interpolation function that returns a color corresponding to a number t with a value between 0 and 1. The d3-scale-chromatic offers a lot of those functions.

Values lower than the min get the color of the min value; similarly, values higher than the max get the color of the max value. By default, the min/max range is set to 0 / 100.

{
  type: 'continuous';
  min?: Value;
  max?: Value;
  color: [string, string] | ((t: number) => string);
}

Ordinal color map

This configuration takes two properties—values and colors—and maps those values to their respective colors.

If a value is not defined, it will fall back to the unknownColor, and if this is also undefined, then it falls back on the series color.

This configuration can be used in Bar Charts to set colors according to string categories.

{
  type: 'ordinal';
  values: Value[];
  colors: string[];
  unknownColor?: string;
}

Overlay

Charts have a loading and noData overlays that appear if:

• loading prop is set to true.
• There is no data to display.

Axis display

You can provide the axes data to display them while loading the data.

Custom overlay

To modify the overlay message, you can use the message props as follows:

<BarChart
  slotProps={{
    // Custom loading message
    loadingOverlay: { message: 'Data should be available soon.' },
    // Custom message for empty chart
    noDataOverlay: { message: 'Select some data to display.' },
  }}
/>

For more advanced customization, use the loadingOverlay and noDataOverlay slots link in the following demo.

Styling

Size

By default, charts adapt their sizing to fill their parent element. However, you can modify this behavior by providing height and/or width props.

Those will fix the chart's size to the given value (in px).

Placement

There are two concepts to consider when defining the placement of a chart:

• margin: The space between the SVG border and the axis or drawing area.
• axis size: The space taken by the axis. Each axis has its own size.

The axes have a default size. To update it, use the xAxis and yAxis configuration as follows:

• x-axis: Uses the height prop to define the space taken by the axis.
• y-axis: Uses the width prop instead.

Axes only take up space in the side they are positioned. If the axis is not be displayed (position: 'none'), they will not take up any space, regardless of their size.

CSS

Since the library relies on SVG for rendering, you can customize them as you do with other MUI System components with CSS overriding.

Chart components accept the sx props. From here, you can target any subcomponents with its class name.

Gradients and patterns

It is possible to use gradients and patterns to fill the charts. This can be done by passing your gradient or pattern definition as children of the chart component.

Note that the gradient or pattern defined that way is only usable for SVG. So a direct definition like color: "url(#Pattern)' would cause undefined colors in HTML elements.