ColorBrewer Palette Picker
Curated categorical, sequential and diverging palettes for charts.
Overview
The ColorBrewer Palette Picker exposes Cynthia Brewer's curated set of categorical, sequential and diverging palettes designed for cartography and data visualisation. Pick the data type (qualitative, sequential or diverging), choose the number of classes, and the tool returns a ready-to-copy list of hex codes alongside flags for print-, photocopy- and colorblind-safety.
It is the go-to resource for anyone making thematic maps, statistical charts or dashboard heatmaps. The palettes have been validated for perceptual ordering and accessibility, which removes most of the guesswork that comes with building a custom scale from scratch.
How it works
The palettes are the original ColorBrewer 2.0 sets, indexed by name, type and class count. Sequential palettes order colours along a perceived lightness ramp from light to dark, diverging palettes place two ramps around a neutral midpoint, and qualitative palettes pick distinguishable hues at roughly equal lightness.
Each palette in the dataset carries metadata flagging whether it remains distinguishable when printed in greyscale, when photocopied, on an LCD projector, and under common colorblindness simulations. The picker surfaces those flags as small icons so you can filter to safer scales when accessibility is a constraint.
Examples
Blues (sequential, 5) → #eff3ff #bdd7e7 #6baed6 #3182bd #08519c
RdBu (diverging, 7) → #b2182b #ef8a62 #fddbc7 #f7f7f7 #d1e5f0 #67a9cf #2166ac
Set2 (qualitative, 4) → #66c2a5 #fc8d62 #8da0cb #e78ac3
FAQ
When do I use sequential vs diverging?
Sequential palettes suit data that orders from low to high (population, elevation). Diverging palettes are for data that has a meaningful midpoint (deviation from zero, before/after).
Why are some palettes only available up to nine classes?
Beyond nine classes the colours become too perceptually close to distinguish. ColorBrewer caps each set at the maximum count it can support without losing legibility.
Is RdYlGn colorblind-safe?
The red-yellow-green diverging palette is one of the few that is flagged as not colorblind-safe — red and green collapse under deuteranopia. Prefer RdBu, PuOr or PiYG when accessibility matters.
Can I use these for product UI accents?
The qualitative palettes work well for categorical badges or chart series. Sequential and diverging palettes are designed for ordered data and rarely fit a general UI.
Are these palettes copyrighted?
ColorBrewer is released under the Apache 2.0 licence, so the palettes are free to use commercially with attribution.