Collections

Hand-assembled reading paths through the library — Cartography Essentials, Colorblind-Safe Workflows, Foundational Reading, The OKLCh Ecosystem, Perceptual Colormaps, and Weekend Rabbit Holes.

Cartography Essentials

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.

Colorblind-Safe Workflows

Most accessibility work focuses on text contrast, which is the easy half of the problem. These entries are about the harder half: making sure two distinct semantic categories stay distinct after a CVD transform, picking sequential palettes that survive deuteranopia, and auditing palettes you have already shipped. Start with Okabe and Ito, whose eight-color set is still the safest categorical default; the Viz Palette and Color Oracle simulators are the quickest sanity checks; DaltonLens explains why some simulators lie; and ColorBrewer remains the gold standard for choropleths.

Foundational Reading

The papers and books the rest of the library keeps quoting, in roughly the order they are worth reading. Albers teaches you to distrust a swatch seen in isolation; Brewer and Harrower turned that into schemes for maps; Borland and Taylor, Light and Bartlein, and Crameri made the case against the rainbow; Kovesi and Moreland showed how to build something better; Ottosson gave front-end color a space that behaves. The papers are short, the books reward a slow read, and each one changes what you notice.

The OKLCh Ecosystem

OKLCh is the color space that quietly turned color tooling honest: perceptual uniformity that holds up across hues, predictable mixing, and gamut behavior that doesn't lie to you. The entries here are the writing and tools that pushed it out of the color-science literature and into front-end practice — start with the Evil Martians piece, then play with the libraries that make it usable.

Perceptual Colormaps

How science got off jet. Borland and Taylor diagnosed the problem, Dave Green's cubehelix and Moreland's cool-warm offered early fixes, and the SciPy 2015 viridis talk made the argument impossible to ignore. Kovesi, Crameri, and Thyng then built whole families whose lightness actually tracks the data, and Turbo is the honest rainbow for the cases where you still want one. Read the talk first, then pick a family and install it.

Weekend Rabbit Holes

Long, strange, and worth it. These are the entries you open on a Saturday morning and look up from at dusk: Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive essay on light, Jamie Wong's trip from hex code to eyeball, Troy Sobotka's guide to what an RGB number actually means, Bruce MacEvoy's decades of watercolor color science, and a few toys — pigment mixing, disputed swatch names, a dictionary of 1930s color pairs — that are more fun than they have any right to be.