Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color? (1996)

Re: Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Col... by jacobolus on Monday November 18, 2013 @04:26AM (#6753471)

Cynthia Brewer’s “Color Brewer” is a great tool. http://colorbrewer2.org

Though note, it’s not really ideal for making gradients, since its “sequential” schemes only go up to 9 distinct categories, and its “diverging” schemes only go up to 11 distinct categories. If you took the suggested colors and made them equally spaced control points in a photoshop/CSS/etc. gradient, you’d get a reasonable outcome.

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Re: Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Col... by jdherman on Monday November 18, 2013 @07:40AM (#6754012)

There are libraries for matlab (and I think matplotlib too) that let you interpolate the ColorBrewer maps into gradients. Here's the matlab one: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/34087-cb...

Also for gradients, I wrote a pretty simple colormap editor here: http://colormap.org/. This maybe gives too much freedom, since it doesn't enforce any best practices as far as colorblindness is concerned. But if you make sure the brightness (the gray line) is monotonic, it's a step in the right direction.

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Re: Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Col... by heuermh on Monday November 18, 2013 @04:12PM (#6757063)

Cool editor, thanks for the link.

I wrote a library similar to what you describe for matlab in java: http://www.dishevelled.org/color-scheme/

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