About
An open catalog of color palettes for maps, published alongside map party. Each entry records where the palette came from, what kind of data it suits, and what it looks like on a real basemap — so a choice of color can be made deliberately rather than by reaching for whatever was on top.
Licensing, in short
The site's code and its original prose — the provenance and use-case notes — are MIT licensed (LICENSE). The palettes themselves are not ours to license: each color specification carries the terms of whoever designed it, recorded on that palette's page and summarized below. If you use a palette, honor its terms, not ours.
Attribution
This product includes color specifications and designs developed by Cynthia Brewer (http://colorbrewer.org/).
- ColorBrewer — Cynthia A. Brewer, Pennsylvania State University. colorbrewer.org. Licensed under the Apache License 2.0; the sentence above is required verbatim.
- Scientific colour maps — Crameri, F. (2023). Scientific colour maps. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.8035877 . See also Crameri, F., Shephard, G. E., & Heron, P. J. (2020), “The misuse of colour in science communication”, Nature Communications 11, 5444.
- Paul Tol's colour schemes — Tol, P., Colour Schemes, SRON technical note SRON/EPS/TN/09-002. sronpersonalpages.nl/~pault .
- Okabe & Ito — Okabe, M., & Ito, K. (2002), Color Universal Design (CUD): How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to colorblind people.
- matplotlib / BIDS colormaps — viridis and its siblings were developed by Nathaniel J. Smith, Stéfan van der Walt and Eric Firing, and dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 (BIDS/colormap).
- cmocean — Thyng, K. M., Greene, C. A., Hetland, R. D., Zimmerle, H. M., & DiMarco, S. F. (2016), “True colors of oceanography: Guidelines for effective and accurate colormap selection”, Oceanography 29(3), 9–13. MIT licensed.
- CARTOColors — the
carto-safepalette comes from CARTO's CARTOColors schemes, licensed under CC BY 4.0 ( CartoDB/cartocolor). - d3-scale-chromatic / Tableau 10 — the
category10palette descends from Tableau's default categorical sequence by way of Mike Bostock'sschemeCategory10, distributed under the ISC license ( d3/d3-scale-chromatic).
The live map on each palette page draws a Protomaps basemap built from OpenStreetMap data, with land-cover shading from ESA WorldCover; those attributions — Protomaps, OpenStreetMap and “© ESA WorldCover” — are rendered in the map itself, by the map's own attribution control, wherever a basemap is shown.
Corrections
Provenance notes are written from primary sources where we could find them, and they are the part of this catalog most likely to be wrong. If an attribution here is incomplete or a citation is misstated, that is a bug — please say so.