A photograph of Marie Skłodowska-Curie (by Henri Manuel around 1920), the Earth from space, and an apple demonstrate the superiority of scientific colour maps as they are shown a in their original form (middle) and in distorted (left) and in undistorted (right) colour versions. Inferring the true picture from an unscientifically (e.g., jet) coloured data set is incomparably harder than from a data set represented in a perceptually uniform and ordered colour map, like batlow. By knowing what something looks like in advance, the distortion by unscientific colour maps, like jet or rainbow, becomes instantly obvious. The look of scientific data is, however, usually unknown a priori, which makes the distortion of an unscientific colour map, and the true data representation of a scientifically derived colour map, like batlow, less apparent, but not less significant. Figure originally published in Crameri et al. (2020).
- Creator: Fabio Crameri
- This version: 14.02.2024
- License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Specific citation: This graphic by Fabio Crameri from Crameri et al. (2020) is available via the open-access s-ink.org repository.
- Related reference: Crameri, F., G.E. Shephard, and P.J. Heron (2020), The misuse of colour in science communication, Nature Communications, 11, 5444. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-19160-7
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