Experiments in Colour

I've been experimenting with colour and animations a lot recently. This involves producing a lot of material that ends up on the floor of the editing room, so to speak. So, I made an entirely pointless animation of said cuttings... The one below is an animated gif (nerd speak) of the North West of England and its commuting 'intensity' (i.e. spikes for areas where people commute to). The visual effects are just from my experiments - some just for the sake of art. An assault on the eyeballs, to be sure!

How to Shade Your Maps - Colorbrewer

A short post today about 'Colorbrewer'. What is it? It's a website by Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower and Penn State University (home of many GIS/visualisation boffins) which you can use to help you decide what colours you maps should be. This is not a trivial matter and it is often difficult to develop an appropriate colour scheme that looks good, is colour blind friendly, print friendly and photocopy friendly. Hence the Colorbrewer website.


You can choose from a variety of colour schemes, you can choose the number of colours in you colour scheme, you can export the information in various ways and you can even download a 'colortool' extension for ArcGIS.

There is so much advice on the website - it really is excellent but I just never got round to blogging about it until now. Ultimately you still have to make choices yourself but with Colorbrewer these choices can be much more appropriate. Take a look...