Nordpil

Color ideas for maps

There was recently a great thread on the Society for Conservation GIS mailing list about picking colors, ramps and colorschemes for maps. Some of the obvious links were there, and a few new. I thought I would just make some notes as a summary...

You can read the thread on the SCGIS forums.

• ColorPic is a very handy little software tool that I have used in the past
• For desktop color pickers, I have also used the Microsearch Color Picker
• For maps an amazing tool is ColorBrewer by Cynthia Brewer and
  team at Penn State. It allows you to browse and choose schemes that are
  colorblind safe and/or print friendly and/or photocopy safe. And then you can download color definitions for use in desktop programs such as Adobe Illustrator and ESRI ArcGIS/ArcMap
• Some more links that were floating around in the discussion:

  http://colorschemedesigner.com/

  https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

  http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

  30 more ideas:

  http://www.creativebloq.com/colour/tools-colour-schemes-12121430
  http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes