Just a bit of Tuesday low-hanging fruit: The market overview chart on the Google Finance home page has been bugging me for months so I figure I'd just fix it in my own head and share it. Here's the current chart: The problem is that the first action is to look at the chartlines. All three are doing well today, but orange is ahead of red and red is ahead of blue. So what are the color assignments? The legend is at the top of the chart, but the detailed data is at the bottom, meaning the user has to play some visual hopscotch to link these visual tables up together, resulting in a visual trail like this: There's no need for the redundancy. One solution is to incorporate the legend into the detailed data area at the bottom. This has the nice side benefit of cleaning up the top. For some unknown reason the current date doesn't appear anywhere on the Google Finance home page. That sort of thing is usually important when displaying idempotent data, so I've included the current date to give the chart context if clipped and pasted somewhere else. That looks like this: Another option is to use the link text itself to convey the color pairing. This messes with Google's visual standards a bit, but might be warranted here. Also, the orange is a bit too light for readability so I darkened it a little in the text but since it's hard for the eye to get a true luminance from a chartline the discrepancy is pretty unnoticeable: It's a tough call which is better, but the first solution (with the dots) is a bit cleaner and less aggressive. Let's go with that and call it a day.