And yesterday a paper explaining the process of creating Cividis, an even more CVD friendly iteration, was published on plos.org[0]. It's already in Matplotlib, and available for R[1].

(I submitted it yesterday but it didn't get much traction[2], which makes sense given how specific it is)

[0] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna...

[1] https://github.com/marcosci/cividis

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17667572

I looked at the paper, and wouldn't really call cividis an iteration of viridis. It's more of a conversion of viridis to "CVD colorspace" (can you say that?), with a few tweaks applied.

Well, from my CVD point of view it looks like one ;). It's largely the same except with better color contrast and ability to distinguish detail. But I understand it actually is missing a significant chunk of green hues for the non-colorblind.

Odd indeed, especially since it has all the other useful tools one could use to create palettes. Maybe the target audience is creative people, not us just reusing ad nauseum the same effective palette.