Tol Iridescent
Paul Tol — iridescent scheme
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#fefbe9 -
#ddecbf -
#b5ddd8 -
#81c4e7 -
#9398d2 -
#9a709e -
#46353a
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
Iridescent is Tol's sequential scheme, published as 23 colors running from a near-white cream through pale greens and blues to a dark slate. It is unusual among sequential ramps in staying light for most of its length, which is what makes it usable as a background layer. Tol allows it to be used as given or linearly interpolated; this entry takes 7 of his 23 published colors by even index, with no interpolation.
When to use it
A quiet ordered ramp for when the data layer is the context rather than the subject — a background surface under a point layer, a soft density wash under labelled features. On a white basemap the first two classes are barely there, which is usually what you want and occasionally a bug: add outlines if the low class must be countable. For a ramp that dominates the map, use viridis or batlow instead.
License
Free to use with citation (no formal license) · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.