# Notes

Canonical URL: https://colorcurio.us/notes
Source type: Directory

> Long-form writing on color, palettes, and the tooling around them.

- [Anatomy of a colormap](https://colorcurio.us/notes/anatomy-of-a-colormap) (2026-05-30): 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?](https://colorcurio.us/notes/diverging-pivot-sharpness) (2026-05-30): 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.