
A Cartographer Who’s Transforming Map Design - kurren
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/cindy-brewer-map-design/?utm_content=buffere263a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
======
rubidium
Some of her earlier papers can be found here:
[http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/Pub_scans/Brewer_pubs.html](http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/Pub_scans/Brewer_pubs.html)

Here's the ColorBrewer tool:
[http://colorbrewer2.org/](http://colorbrewer2.org/)

I never thought about what a PhD in cartography would look like. Nice to learn
more about the thought being put into maps.

~~~
pella
more presentation:
[http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ScaleMaster/](http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ScaleMaster/)

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larrydag
Here is the popular Color Brewer implementation in R.
[https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RColorBrewer/index.h...](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RColorBrewer/index.html)

A tutorial on how to implement RColorBrewer in R.
[http://www.compbiome.com/2010/12/r-using-rcolorbrewer-to-
col...](http://www.compbiome.com/2010/12/r-using-rcolorbrewer-to-colour-
your.html)

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gavreh
Here's the blog post about how her work has influenced Esri's ArcGIS software:
[http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2014/11/12/brewing-a-
new-c...](http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2014/11/12/brewing-a-new-color-
palette-for-arcgis-pro/)

~~~
anc84
Which the FLOSS QGIS natively had available for a long time before them. ;)

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ipunchghosts
I sit a few buildings down from Cindy's office and have also been studying
colormaps quite a bit in the last 3 years. Its interesting how many plotting
packages get this wrong but are finally catching up.

I switched from Matlab to Python years ago and was sad to see pyplot using the
default rainbow palette still. However, there was some good work done by Chris
Beaumont to improve the plot quality. See:
[http://plotornot.chrisbeaumont.org/](http://plotornot.chrisbeaumont.org/) You
can easily import these styles into matplotlib using rcparams.

Matlab is using a roughly perceptually linearly luminant colormap they call
Parula now. Good job Matlab.

Paulo Penteado has also done some good work in this area. See:
[http://www.ppenteado.net/ast/csbc2012_pfp_2_pres.pdf](http://www.ppenteado.net/ast/csbc2012_pfp_2_pres.pdf)

I want to talk about the Luv Lab colorspace. There are several places on the
net (even in the literature) that are wrong about these colorspaces saying Lab
is for emissive displays and Luv is for reflected light. This is actually not
true. (If anything it is reversed). See:
[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/scikit-
image/DIRaSXJoEes/2jD...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/scikit-
image/DIRaSXJoEes/2jDwuwmxRTYJ) and Berns reference.

The interesting with colorspaces (and colormaps thereof) is that working in a
perceptual space like Luv/Lab is yields a non-linear (and non-convex) gamut in
the sRGB space used by most monitors. There is more "headroom" in the magenta
hue of colors than say green. However, you have to then look at monitor output
as a function of hue and human sensitivity -- with a red object and blue
object with the same reflectance under the same illumination, the red object
will appear darker to humans. So there are many transfer functions at work
here which makes the problem challenging in picking the right colormap that is
perceptually uniform, has the maximum number of perceived differences, and has
the appropriate number of hues for best represeting your dataset.

Finally, it would not be complete of me to not mention this article:
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=411848...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4118486&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D4118486)

Slides: [http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mweigle/cs725s15/presentations/nam-
pr...](http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mweigle/cs725s15/presentations/nam-
presentation.pdf)

~~~
urschrei
> Matlab is using a roughly perceptually linearly luminant colormap they call
> Parula now. Good job Matlab.

And Matplotlib is switching to a perceptually-linear default colormap called
"viridis" with the 2.0 release (due early this month):
[http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html](http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html)

~~~
jacobolus
I’m glad that people are finally catching up to Cynthia Brewer (who has been
discussing the issue for 20+ years) and using reasonable color models to think
about data displays.

It would be nice if color pickers, color manipulation tools in graphics
software, etc. would also switch to more perceptually relevant models.

If anyone wants to play with the CIECAM02 model discussed in the talk you
linked, I made an implementation in Javascript several years back,
[https://github.com/jrus/chromatist/](https://github.com/jrus/chromatist/)

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wscott
The "Tufte" of maps.

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electricblue
I've been using colorbrewer to make maps for many years now, nice to see her
getting some recognition.

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heuermh
This java library (among several others, certainly) provides color schemes for
data viz, including the ColorBrewer schemes

[http://www.dishevelled.org/color-scheme/](http://www.dishevelled.org/color-
scheme/)

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hackuser
The article is dated, very subtly, 2014. Look just above the headline, next to
the byline.

