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…

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: Map color schemes filtered by class count, scheme type, print safety, and colorblind safety. (source)
  2. Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users: A GIS map-design guide from ColorBrewer’s author, with a long, practical section on choosing color schemes. (source)
  3. Cartography.: An illustrated compendium of more than 250 map-design topics, treating color as a choice about data. (source)
  4. Scientific Colour Maps: Perceptually uniform, colorblind-friendly maps such as batlow and vik, built to replace rainbow scales. (source)
  5. cmocean: Oceanography colormaps — thermal, haline, dense, and more — each matched to the variable it encodes. (source)
  6. Using Colors on Maps: How to match sequential, diverging, and qualitative schemes to the data on a map. (source)
  7. Bivariate Choropleth Maps: A How-to Guide: How to blend two sequential ramps into a 3×3 map legend whose diagonal still reads. (source)
  8. The Development and Rationale of Cross-blended Hypsometric Tints: Elevation tints that shift with climate — green lowlands in wet regions, tan ones in deserts. (source)
  9. Firefly Cartography: A recipe for glow maps: a dark, desaturated basemap, a masked highlight, and one bright thematic layer. (source)
  10. Phosphor: Turn a few hexes into a ramp whose lightness climbs evenly in OKLab, with CVD previews. (source)
  11. Palettize: A CLI and Python library for colormaps: terminal previews, CVD and perceptual checks, and export to GDAL and QGIS. (source)
  12. Paul Tol’s Notes: Qualitative, sequential, and diverging schemes that stay distinct under color-vision deficiency, with the reasoning for each. (source)
  13. The Misuse of Colour in Science Communication: How rainbow and red–green maps distort scientific figures, and what to use instead. (source)
  14. CARTOColors: CARTO’s sequential, diverging, and qualitative schemes for thematic maps, including Bold, Prism, and Safe. (source)
  15. MapColPal: Judge thematic-map palettes painted onto a sample map instead of a row of detached swatches. (source)
  16. Color Oracle: A free desktop app that filters your whole screen through protan, deutan, or tritan vision. (source)
  17. gdaldem color-relief: GDAL’s docs for coloring a raster from a text color table — the format QGIS, GMT, and colormap exporters write. (source)
  18. ColorBrewer.org: An Online Tool for Selecting Colour Schemes for Maps: Why ColorBrewer exists, and how its schemes were tested on real maps rather than swatches. (source)
  19. Color Use Guidelines for Mapping and Visualization: The chapter that sorted map schemes into sequential, diverging, and qualitative — the typology ColorBrewer uses. (source)
  20. Viz Palette: Preview chart colors as marks and a legend, with a color-vision simulation, before you commit to them. (source)
  21. Chroma.js: A JS library for color scales and interpolation, and the engine behind the Chroma.js palette helper. (source)
  22. D3 Color: D3’s color module: parse, convert, and adjust RGB, HSL, Lab, HCL, and cubehelix colors. (source)