Yellow–Orange–Red
ColorBrewer 2.0 (Brewer & Harrower)
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#ffffb2 -
#fed976 -
#feb24c -
#fd8d3c -
#fc4e2a -
#e31a1c -
#b10026
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
YlOrRd is ColorBrewer's warm sequential ramp, running pale yellow through orange to a deep crimson. It inherits the "heat" reading that people bring from weather and hazard maps, which makes it the most legible ramp when the quantity itself is meant to feel like intensity. ColorBrewer flags it colorblind-safe: its ordering survives red-green deficiency because the lightness ramp does the work, not the hue.
When to use it
Reach for it when high values are the story and you want them to read as urgent — heat, fire risk, incident rates, crowding. It is a loud palette by design, so it needs a desaturated basemap; on a colorful one the mid-oranges collide with roads and landuse fills. Avoid it for anything where "red = bad" would be an editorial claim you do not intend to make.
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.