Spectral
ColorBrewer 2.0 (Brewer & Harrower)
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#d53e4f -
#fc8d59 -
#fee08b -
#ffffbf -
#e6f598 -
#99d594 -
#3288bd
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
Provenance
Spectral is ColorBrewer's rainbow-flavoured diverging scheme — red through yellow to blue — and one of several ColorBrewer schemes not flagged as colorblind-safe. It is enormously popular and mildly notorious: it inherits the perceptual problems of rainbow ramps (uneven lightness steps, a yellow band that reads as a boundary) while remaining the most immediately legible palette to an audience that has seen a thousand weather maps.
When to use it
Use it when audience familiarity beats perceptual rigour — a public-facing temperature or air-quality map where the red-to-blue reading is already learned. Keep the class count low and never use it where readers must estimate magnitude precisely, because the yellow band exaggerates the middle. It is the loudest palette in this corpus: it needs a near-monochrome basemap and it should not carry a CVD-safety claim.
License
Apache-style ColorBrewer License (attribution required) · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.