# Cartography Essentials

Canonical URL: https://colorcurio.us/library/collections/cartography-essentials
Source type: Collection

## Summary

If you make maps, these are the entries to know about. The list leans toward palettes engineered for terrain, bathymetry, and choropleths — palettes where the lightness curve matters more than how the colors look in isolation. Pair this list with the colormaps section: cmocean and Scientific Colour Maps are the names you'll see repeated, and both deserve to be in your default toolkit.

## Entries

1. [ColorBrewer 2.0](https://colorbrewer2.org/) — The classic tool for selecting color schemes for maps and data visualization, based on research by Cynthia Brewer. — https://colorcurio.us/library/colorbrewer
2. [CARTOColors](https://carto.com/carto-colors/) — Data-driven color schemes designed specifically for cartography and map visualization. — https://colorcurio.us/library/carto-colors
3. [Viz Palette](https://projects.susielu.com/viz-palette) — Build and evaluate color palettes for data visualization with colorblind simulation. — https://colorcurio.us/library/viz-palette
4. [Chroma.js](https://gka.github.io/chroma.js/) — A small but powerful library for color conversions, color scales, and color interpolation. — https://colorcurio.us/library/chroma-js
5. [D3 Color](https://d3js.org/d3-color) — D3's color manipulation module with support for various color spaces and interpolation. — https://colorcurio.us/library/d3-color