# Cartography Essentials

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

> 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…

## 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://colorcurio.us/library/colorbrewer): Map color schemes filtered by class count, scheme type, print safety, and colorblind safety. ([source](https://colorbrewer2.org/))
2. [Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users](https://colorcurio.us/library/designing-better-maps): A GIS map-design guide from ColorBrewer’s author, with a long, practical section on choosing color schemes. ([source](https://www.esri.com/en-us/esri-press/browse/designing-better-maps-a-guide-for-gis-users))
3. [Cartography.](https://colorcurio.us/library/cartography-field): An illustrated compendium of more than 250 map-design topics, treating color as a choice about data. ([source](https://www.esri.com/en-us/esri-press/browse/cartography-the-definitive-guide-to-making-maps))
4. [Scientific Colour Maps](https://colorcurio.us/library/scientific-colour-maps): Perceptually uniform, colorblind-friendly maps such as batlow and vik, built to replace rainbow scales. ([source](https://www.fabiocrameri.ch/colourmaps/))
5. [cmocean](https://colorcurio.us/library/cmocean): Oceanography colormaps — thermal, haline, dense, and more — each matched to the variable it encodes. ([source](https://matplotlib.org/cmocean/))
6. [Using Colors on Maps](https://colorcurio.us/library/axismaps-colors-on-maps): How to match sequential, diverging, and qualitative schemes to the data on a map. ([source](https://www.axismaps.com/guide/using-colors-on-maps))
7. [Bivariate Choropleth Maps: A How-to Guide](https://colorcurio.us/library/bivariate-choropleth): How to blend two sequential ramps into a 3×3 map legend whose diagonal still reads. ([source](https://www.joshuastevens.net/cartography/make-a-bivariate-choropleth-map/))
8. [The Development and Rationale of Cross-blended Hypsometric Tints](https://colorcurio.us/library/hypsometric-tints): Elevation tints that shift with climate — green lowlands in wet regions, tan ones in deserts. ([source](https://doi.org/10.14714/CP69.20))
9. [Firefly Cartography](https://colorcurio.us/library/firefly-cartography): A recipe for glow maps: a dark, desaturated basemap, a masked highlight, and one bright thematic layer. ([source](https://adventuresinmapping.com/2016/10/17/firefly-cartography/))
10. [Phosphor](https://colorcurio.us/library/phosphor): Turn a few hexes into a ramp whose lightness climbs evenly in OKLab, with CVD previews. ([source](https://www.joshuastevens.net/phosphor/))
11. [Palettize](https://colorcurio.us/library/palettize): A CLI and Python library for colormaps: terminal previews, CVD and perceptual checks, and export to GDAL and QGIS. ([source](https://kovaca.github.io/palettize/))
12. [Paul Tol’s Notes](https://colorcurio.us/library/paul-tol-s-notes): Qualitative, sequential, and diverging schemes that stay distinct under color-vision deficiency, with the reasoning for each. ([source](https://sronpersonalpages.nl/~pault/))
13. [The Misuse of Colour in Science Communication](https://colorcurio.us/library/misuse-of-colour): How rainbow and red–green maps distort scientific figures, and what to use instead. ([source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19160-7))
14. [CARTOColors](https://colorcurio.us/library/carto-colors): CARTO’s sequential, diverging, and qualitative schemes for thematic maps, including Bold, Prism, and Safe. ([source](https://carto.com/carto-colors/))
15. [MapColPal](https://colorcurio.us/library/mapcolpal): Judge thematic-map palettes painted onto a sample map instead of a row of detached swatches. ([source](https://mapcolpal.github.io/))
16. [Color Oracle](https://colorcurio.us/library/color-oracle): A free desktop app that filters your whole screen through protan, deutan, or tritan vision. ([source](https://colororacle.org/))
17. [gdaldem color-relief](https://colorcurio.us/library/gdaldem-color-relief): GDAL’s docs for coloring a raster from a text color table — the format QGIS, GMT, and colormap exporters write. ([source](https://gdal.org/en/stable/programs/gdaldem.html))
18. [ColorBrewer.org: An Online Tool for Selecting Colour Schemes for Maps](https://colorcurio.us/library/colorbrewer-paper): Why ColorBrewer exists, and how its schemes were tested on real maps rather than swatches. ([source](https://doi.org/10.1179/000870403235002042))
19. [Color Use Guidelines for Mapping and Visualization](https://colorcurio.us/library/brewer-color-use-guidelines): The chapter that sorted map schemes into sequential, diverging, and qualitative — the typology ColorBrewer uses. ([source](https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-042415-6.50014-4))
20. [Viz Palette](https://colorcurio.us/library/viz-palette): Preview chart colors as marks and a legend, with a color-vision simulation, before you commit to them. ([source](https://projects.susielu.com/viz-palette))
21. [Chroma.js](https://colorcurio.us/library/chroma-js): A JS library for color scales and interpolation, and the engine behind the Chroma.js palette helper. ([source](https://gka.github.io/chroma.js/))
22. [D3 Color](https://colorcurio.us/library/d3-color): D3’s color module: parse, convert, and adjust RGB, HSL, Lab, HCL, and cubehelix colors. ([source](https://d3js.org/d3-color))