Monday, August 22, 2016

Best way to create custom color palettes for visualization

Colorbrewer is awesome, but quite restrictive. After browsing the web for some time, here's the best too I found, with tools to create very nice-looking, yet usable and informative custom color scales in any aesthetics you want. It's called the "chroma scale helper":
http://gka.github.io/palettes/#colors=lightyellow,gray,teal,indigo|steps=5|bez=1|coL=1

Here's the description of how it works (it's very clever, and worth the read on its own, even if you never use the actual scale helper"
https://vis4.net/blog/posts/mastering-multi-hued-color-scales/

Here's a table of color names it uses (you may have to browse for the color you like, but it's very doable)
http://cng.seas.rochester.edu/CNG/docs/x11color.html

And finally, the source of these links (with some more advice on the matter of colors):
http://lisacharlotterost.github.io/2016/04/22/Colors-for-DataVis/