Brewer Palettes

Brewer palettes are color combinations selected for their special properties for use in data visualization and information design.

The challenge

Selecting effective colors for bar plots, pie charts, and heat maps is made more difficult by the fact that the way we select color in software does not reflect how we perceive the color.

There are many examples of poor color combinations in published figures. For example, if categories are encoded with a combination of bright and dark colors, the bright colors will dominate the reader's attention. On the other hand, if two colors appear similar, the reader will instinctively perceive them as belonging to a group and infer that the underlying variables are related.

Colors with poor contrast (colors with similar perceived brightness) or simultaneous contrast (pure colors) also interfere with interpreting figures.

Selecting Colors in RGB and HSV

Most people select colors using RGB sliders, which is just about the worst way to pick a color! Consider the fact that when we look at a color, we cannot easily decompose it into its red, green and blue components. This limits usefulness of RGB for color selection.

HSV is a better color space, which defines a color based on hue, saturation and value. These are three properties that we intuitively assess when we see a color. We think of a "dark rich blue" and "light faded red", making HSV a reasonably useful model for color selection. Unfortunately, HSV has a nagging problem — although it is based on intuitive parameters, it is not perceptually uniform.

Perceptual Uniformity

A color space that is perceptually uniform defines colors based on how we perceive them. Distances between colors in the space are proportional to their perceived difference.

Above, we saw that HSV was not perceptually uniform. Moving the hue slider by 60 can have a small or large effect on a color, depending on where the slider is positioned.

Consider the following example. You have a chart that uses two colors, and orange and green. Both were chosen with S=V=100%. You now need to select a second color for each that is brighter. You cannot directly use HSV because both orange and green colors are already at full value. How do you intuitively increase brightness?

The reason why you cannot in do this in HSV is because V does not directly correspond to the color's perceived brightness. You are stuck fiddling with the saturation and value to try to select a brighter pairing.

What would be useful here is a color space which uses the intuitive parameters of HSV, but is perceptually based. In other words, instead of value, the space would define a color based on its perceived brightness. Luckily, this space exists — LCH, which defines color based on its luminance (perceived brightness), chroma (purity) and hue. Unfortunately, design and presentation software do not have LCH sliders and we cannot easily take advantage of this color space.

This is where the Brewer palettes come in.

Brewer Palettes

Brewer palettes were selected for their perceptual properties. These palettes were created by Cynthia Brewer for the purpose in cartography, but have found use in other fields.

Types of Brewer Palettes

There are three types of Brewer palettes

• qualitative — colors do not have a perceived order
• sequential — colors have a perceived order and perceived difference between successive colors is uniform
• diverging — two back-to-back sequential palettes starting from a common color

Swatches of Brewer Palettes

I have prepared Brewer palette swatches in .ase or .ai format. For programming, use the plain-text version.

The image below (zoom) shows all the Brewer palettes.

Uses of Brewer Palettes

Qualitative palettes are excellent for bar plots and pie charts, where colors correspond to categories.

Grayscale Brewer palettes are available and are perfect for achieving good tone separation in black-and-white figures.

Sequential and diverging palettes are useful for heatmaps.

Brewer Palettes and Color Blindness

Some Brewer palettes are safe for color blindness — the pink-yellow-green (piyg) is one. For others, see colorbrewer.