Vik
Crameri scientific colour maps (vik)
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#001260 -
#3a6da3 -
#8fb4d6 -
#e6e6e6 -
#dcae96 -
#bd6a4e -
#871414
On a map
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
Vik is the flagship diverging map of Fabio Crameri's Scientific Colour Maps, published and versioned since 2018 and widely adopted in geoscience for anomaly figures. It is built so the two arms are perceptually symmetric — equal data distances either side of the midpoint look equally far — which the common red-blue schemes do not guarantee. The suite is MIT-licensed and archived on Zenodo; this entry follows v8.
When to use it
Vik is the accessible default for data that crosses a true zero: differences, residuals, anomalies, gain and loss. Its light grey midpoint reads as genuinely neutral, so anchor the classification on zero and let the symmetric arms do the work. Unlike Red–Blue it stays legible under all three CVD types, which makes it the better choice for anything published to a general audience.
License
MIT · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.