Yellow–Green–Blue
ColorBrewer 2.0 (Brewer & Harrower)
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#ffffcc -
#c7e9b4 -
#7fcdbb -
#41b6c4 -
#1d91c0 -
#225ea8 -
#0c2c84
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
YlGnBu is one of the multi-hue sequential schemes in ColorBrewer 2.0, the choropleth palette system Cynthia Brewer and Mark Harrower built at Penn State from Brewer's cartographic research on how map readers actually order colors. Multi-hue ramps like this one exist because a single hue runs out of usable lightness steps somewhere around five classes; adding hue as a second ordering cue buys another two or three. ColorBrewer flags it colorblind-safe, and it is one of the most-used ramps in web cartography because D3 and every GIS package ship it.
When to use it
A workhorse for counts and rates that climb steadily — population density, rainfall, accessibility scores — where you want more than five classes and still need the reader to rank them at a glance. The pale yellow low end all but disappears on a light basemap, which is usually a feature: it keeps the map quiet where the data is quiet. Give the dark blue end room by keeping labels off the top class, or halo them.
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.