Reflections on the Uses and Available Choices of Categorical Colorschemes

Sara Di Bartolomeo, Raphael Buchmüller, Alexander Frings, Johannes Fuchs, Daniel Keim

2025

Abstract

Categorical colorschemes must respect a number of criteria — mainly, they need to incorporate a number of easily distinguishable colors, and they need to avoid giving to the reader the impression that the colors in the visualization have particular relationships. Crafting these palettes requires careful attention to the distribution of colors; thus, for a long time, visualization designers have been relying on a limited choice of readily available palettes. Although such palettes have been proven practical and functional, our own experience with designing visualizations had us struggle repeatedly with the limited choice, the feeling of repetitiveness in seeing the same colors in visualization papers, and a number of other limitations that we discuss in the paper. In this document, we discuss some properties of the most common categorical colorschemes, and propose a method to generate new palettes that are comparable in properties to the existing ones.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Di Bartolomeo S., Buchmüller R., Frings A., Fuchs J. and Keim D. (2025). Reflections on the Uses and Available Choices of Categorical Colorschemes. In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-728-3, SciTePress, pages 843-850. DOI: 10.5220/0013109400003912

in Bibtex Style

@conference{ivapp25,
author={Sara Di Bartolomeo and Raphael Buchmüller and Alexander Frings and Johannes Fuchs and Daniel Keim},
title={Reflections on the Uses and Available Choices of Categorical Colorschemes},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP},
year={2025},
pages={843-850},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013109400003912},
isbn={978-989-758-728-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP
TI - Reflections on the Uses and Available Choices of Categorical Colorschemes
SN - 978-989-758-728-3
AU - Di Bartolomeo S.
AU - Buchmüller R.
AU - Frings A.
AU - Fuchs J.
AU - Keim D.
PY - 2025
SP - 843
EP - 850
DO - 10.5220/0013109400003912
PB - SciTePress