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Bamako

Crameri scientific colour maps (bamako)

On a map

Basemap

A synthetic demo grid, classed with equal intervals — the point is the palette against real basemap ink, not the data. Switch themes to see how much basemap the palette leaves room for.

Metadata

Type
Multi-sequential
Family
Scientific
Character
naturalisticwarmalgorithmic
Color vision
✓ deuteranopia ✓ protanopia ✓ tritanopia
Data shapes
long tail right
Visual weight
0.60 · moderate
Basemap headroom
0.55

Provenance

Bamako is one of Fabio Crameri's Scientific Colour Maps, the perceptually uniform suite he has published and versioned since 2018 as a corrective to rainbow colormaps that invent gradients the data does not contain. Crameri's papers showed that a non-uniform colormap can visually create boundaries and hide real ones, and the suite was built to be verifiably free of that — each map ships with lightness and CVD diagnostics. This entry follows v8 of the suite, archived on Zenodo under the MIT license.

When to use it

Bamako climbs from a dark teal through olive and ochre to pale straw, an earthy ramp that reads naturally for terrain, aridity, soil, and biomass. Like lapaz it is a good long-tail workhorse: the multi-hue path gives you separable steps well past the point where a single-hue ramp would flatten out. It is the warmer sibling — choose it when the map's other layers are cool, or when the subject matter calls for an earth-toned register.

License

MIT · source

The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.