map party design

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Lapaz

Crameri scientific colour maps (lapaz)

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
moderncoolnaturalisticalgorithmic
Color vision
✓ deuteranopia ✓ protanopia ✓ tritanopia
Data shapes
long tail right
Visual weight
0.60 · moderate
Basemap headroom
0.55

Provenance

Lapaz belongs to the Scientific Colour Maps, the suite Fabio Crameri began publishing in 2018 after documenting how badly non-uniform rainbow colormaps distort scientific figures. Every map in the suite is built to be perceptually uniform and readable under color vision deficiency, and is shipped with diagnostic plots so the claim can be checked rather than taken on faith. The suite is versioned and archived on Zenodo — this entry follows v8 — and released under the MIT license.

When to use it

Lapaz runs from a deep indigo through a muted teal and sage into warm sand, so it gives you a long, evenly-paced ramp with more discriminable steps than a single-hue scheme. That makes it a good fit for heavy right tails — income, population density, trip counts — especially after a log or quantile classification, where you need the crowded low end to still separate. Use it when a plain Blues ramp collapses the bottom half of the data into one indistinguishable wash.

License

MIT · source

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