ColorBrewer
Online color tool for cartography
ColorBrewer is an online tool for selecting map color schemes based on palettes created by Cynthia Brewer. It was launched in 2002 by Brewer, Mark Harrower, and The Pennsylvania State University. Suggested color schemes are based on data type (sequential, diverging, or qualitative). It also provides options for varied display environments, such as laptop, photocopy, and LCD projector, and colorblind safe options.
ColorBrewer is licensed using Apache 2.0 software license, which is similar to CC-BY-SA 3.0.
01Brewer palettes
Valid names and a full color representation for each palette are shown below. If this is viewed in a compliant browser, moving the mouse cursor over each box will pop up the corresponding color number as a tooltip.
- YlGn
- YlGnBu
- GnBu
- BuGn
- PuBuGn
- PuBu
- BuPu
- RdPu
- PuRd
- OrRd
- YlOrRd
- YlOrBr
- Purples
- Blues
- Greens
- Oranges
- Reds
- Greys
- PuOr
- BrBG
- PRGn
- PiYG
- RdBu
- RdGy
- RdYlBu
- Spectral
- RdYlGn
- Accent
- Dark2
- Paired
- Pastel1
- Pastel2
- Set1
- Set2
- Set3
02Applications
In 2018, climate scientist Ed Hawkins chose the eight most saturated blues and reds from the ColorBrewer 9-class single-hue palettes in his design of warming stripes graphics, which visually summarize global warming as an ordered sequence of stripes.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “ColorBrewer”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- ColorBrewer-screenshot.png by Uploaded by User:ClemRutter Screen generated by ColorBrewer (v2 .0) The original ColorBrewer (v1.0) was funded by the NSF Digital Government program during 2001-02, and was designed at the GeoVISTA Center at Penn State (National Science Foundation Grant No. 9983451, 9983459, 9983461). The design and rebuilding of this new version (v2.0) was donated by Axis Maps LLC, winter 2009 and updated in 2013. Cynthia Brewer: Concept / Colors / Editor Mark Harrower: Design / User Interface Ben Sheesley: Design / User Interface Andy Woodruff: Developer David Heyman: Developer The software is provided "as is." All material copyright © 2002-13, Apache License 2.0
- Cynthia Brewer - Mannerfelt Gold Medal.jpg by AileenBuckley, CC0
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