colorcurio.us

A directory of color tools, resources, and curios — a colormap browser with OKLCh diagnostics, an editorially curated library, and four in-house tools.

Just a place to share some neat color stuff from around the web — editorially curated, not algorithmic.

Sections

Colormaps: 386 colormaps with OKLCh perceptual diagnostics
Colormap families: browse by source collection (16 families)
Compare colormaps: side-by-side OKLCh profile comparison
Library: hand-curated directory of 225 color resources
Library collections: thematic reading paths through the library
Tools: four in-house applets: Picker, Gradient, Extract, Vectorscope
Notes: illustrated long-form writing on color
About: what the site is and how it is curated

Latest notes

Anatomy of a colormap: A scroll-driven teardown of every component that makes a colormap useful — anchor stops, oklab mixing, the load-bearing lightness axis, diverging midpoints, and the grayscale test.
How sharp should the pivot be?: Diverging colormaps pivot around a center — but how abruptly? A scroll-driven look at pivot sharpness, a county map you can sharpen by hand, why an asymmetric domain still wants a symmetric scale, and a comparison of how smoothly common diverging maps turn at the pivot.

Collections

Featured in the library

OKLCH in CSS: Why We Moved from RGB and HSL: The case for OKLCH in CSS: lightness that holds across hues, and the syntax to replace RGB and HSL. — Andrey Sitnik
Color.js: A JS library for the CSS Color specs: convert, interpolate, and gamut-map across OKLab, OKLCH, P3, and more. — Lea Verou & Chris Lilley
ColorBrewer 2.0: Map color schemes filtered by class count, scheme type, print safety, and colorblind safety. — Cynthia Brewer
Culori: A functional JS color library for converting, interpolating, and measuring difference across many spaces. — Dan Burzo
A Perceptual Color Space for Image Processing: The post introducing OKLab: where CIELAB’s hue and lightness slip, and the transform that fixes them. — Björn Ottosson
Leonardo Color: Generate UI ramps from a key color so chosen steps hit target contrast ratios against a background. — Nate Baldwin
Subtleties of Color: A six-part NASA series on encoding earth-observation data in color, from rainbow defaults to diverging schemes. — Robert Simmon
Datawrapper: color in data vis: Every Datawrapper blog post on color in data visualization, in one list. — Lisa Charlotte Muth
Scientific Colour Maps: Perceptually uniform, colorblind-friendly maps such as batlow and vik, built to replace rainbow scales. — Fabio Crameri
cmocean: Oceanography colormaps — thermal, haline, dense, and more — each matched to the variable it encodes. — Kristen Thyng
OKLCH Color Picker: Pick colors in OKLCH on the same axes as the CSS function, with sRGB and P3 gamut warnings. — Evil Martians
Phosphor: Turn a few hexes into a ramp whose lightness climbs evenly in OKLab, with CVD previews. — Joshua Stevens
Color Universal Design (CUD): A guide to figures that survive color-vision deficiency, and the source of the eight-color Okabe–Ito palette. — Masataka Okabe & Kei Ito
A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib: The SciPy 2015 talk: the case against jet, and how viridis was designed in CAM02-UCS. — Nathaniel Smith & Stéfan van der Walt
Interaction of Color: Albers’ course in seeing color relatively, in Yale’s complete digital edition with interactive plates. — Josef Albers
Mapping Color to Meaning in Colormap Data Visualizations: Viewers read darker as more — unless a map looks semi-transparent, and then more opaque reads as more. — Karen B. Schloss, Connor C. Gramazio, A. Taylor Silverman, Madeline L. Parker & Audrey S. Wang
Coloring for Colorblindness: Edit swatches and see them as protan, deutan, and tritan viewers would, with Wong, IBM, and Tol sets preloaded. — David Nichols
Is My Blue Your Blue?: Call a run of hues blue or green to find your boundary, then see how it compares with everyone else’s. — Patrick Mineault