Gradients and colour schemes in general
- Cynthia A. Brewer, Professor at the Department of Geography of Pennsylvania State University has made studies in map design, colour theory applications in cartography, hypothesis generation in visualisation and choropleth classification for maps in series. She is an author of the wonderful ColorBrewer site whose schemes are available in cpt translation here.
- Shaded relief is a method for representing topography on maps in a natural, aesthetic, and intuitive manner. At the reliefshading.com site one can find rules and guidelines for the design and production of shaded relief, an overview of its history, examples produced by professional relief artists, technical tips, and much more. See also Tom Patterson’s site, shadedrelief.com.
- Jim Mossman gives an interesting perspective on shading in cartography in a series of articles on his ShadeMax palettes: Parts 1, 2 and 3.
- The Dutch Interaction Designer, Kaeru, exhibits a selection of maps of public transport travel-times in the Netherlands on his Flickr page — the maps apply a colour gradient to discrete data points resulting in an attractive stippled effect which is both intuitive and explicit.
- The COLOURlovers site has a half-million five-colour discrete palettes, a few of which are available here.
- Adam Majewski’s Color Gradient repo on GitHub carries a wealth of introductory material, illustrations and lots of up-to-date links.
See also the links page for software.