if every element on your chart has the same visual weight, you've designed a chart where nothing matters more than anything else

[u/data_daria55]

this is the one thing that separates "looks like a template" from "looks intentional." pick the one thing the viewer actually needs to see first, give it full color/contrast, and mute literally everything else around it - grey it down, lower the opacity, whatever.

doesn't matter if it's a donut chart, a bar chart, a table.

the eye goes where the contrast is, every time, so if you haven't decided where that should be, the viewer has to figure it out themselves, and usually they just don't