Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Rather interesting, but can anybody point to something more practical? Ie some application or website that, given a couple of colors or preferences or sample data, constructs some sort of optimal color scale, preferrably also usable for the most common form of color-blindness?



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.


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.


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/




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: