color – The Map Room

Choosing Colours

Jonathan Crowe — Fri, 31 May 2024 00:12:55 +0000

On the ArcGIS Blog, Heather White has a series of video-tutorial posts exploring how to choose colour¹ when making maps, and what colours can signify on a map. From Color connotations and associations: “Colors are never neutral. They affect how people think and feel about your map. As a cartographer, you should be aware of the connotations and associations carried by the colors you use. They can be powerful tools to help you communicate more clearly. But if you ignore them, they can just as easily sabotage your map’s message.” See also Light and dark color schemes and Choose similar colors to map similar things (which you’d think would go without saying, but then things that ought to go without saying almost always need saying).

Colour Differences in Metro Maps

Jonathan Crowe — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 16:03:11 +0000

Scientific American reprints a 2016 article from The Mathematical Intelligencer on an obscure, but important, corner of transit map design: how to choose a colour for a metro line. The discussion is rather math heavy (and therefore above my pay grade), but the gist is that for ease of use lines’ colours should look as different from one another as possible, and it gets more complicated as you add more lines. “Not only must the new colors be unlike the old ones, but also they must differ from each other as much as possible.” The article discusses the math involved in choosing new colours. [WMS]

Previously: The Transit Line Colour Palette.

The Transit Line Colour Palette

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 23:30:51 +0000

This was way too much fun. cc @transitmap pic.twitter.com/QAcmOLD61c

— Ari Ofsevit (@ofsevit) March 21, 2017

MIT grad student Ari Ofsevit created an infographic showing the colours used to mark transit lines by a number of different North American transit agencies and posted it to Twitter last month, where he got all kinds of feedback. (One response pointed out that the colour choices aren’t great for red-green colour blindness.) Ofsevit, who also makes hiking trail maps in the style of transit maps, is running a Kickstarter to create a poster of the transit palette. [Next City]