Tol Light
Paul Tol — light scheme
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#77aadd -
#ee8866 -
#eedd88 -
#ffaabb -
#99ddff -
#44bb99 -
#bbcc33 -
#aaaa00 -
#dddddd
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
The light scheme is Tol's nine-color set for filling areas rather than drawing lines: light blue, orange, light yellow, pink, light cyan, mint, pear, olive and pale grey. He designed it for backgrounds and large blocks, where the bright and muted schemes would overwhelm whatever is drawn on top of them. From the same SRON technical note, transcribed via khroma.
When to use it
The best qualitative palette in this corpus for large polygon fills that must sit UNDER labels, roads and symbols — zoning, catchments, administrative regions. Its lightness is the whole point: text stays readable on top without halos. It fails as a line palette and on dark styles, where every color collapses towards the background; use Tol Bright or ColorBrewer Dark 2 there.
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.