ColorBrewer
Cynthia Brewer and Mark Harrower's curated cartographic palette set (sequential/diverging/qualitative), bundled into chroma.js as 9-/11-step ramps.
What it is
ColorBrewer is a set of colour palettes “by Mark Harrower and Cynthia A. Brewer.” The gathered record only covers it at second hand, through chroma.js’s own documentation, where it’s called “ColorBrewer palettes” and exposed as chroma.brewer — described there, verbatim typo included, as “an map of” them.
What it is good for
The record behind this page groups the set into sequential, diverging, and qualitative palettes — three different jobs (an ordered range, an ordered range with a midpoint, and unordered categories) rather than one undifferentiated list of “nice” gradients. Nothing in the gathered excerpts explains the internal construction of any one palette beyond that grouping.
A minimal real example
Nothing in the gathered material shows actual call syntax. What is attested: chroma.brewer gives you the named palettes as arrays, and — per chroma.js’s own docs — “only includes the 9-step versions of the palettes (11 steps for the diverging palettes).”
Idioms
The one idiom the record supports: going through chroma.js gets you a fixed resolution per palette, not the full family. If a sketch needs a 9-step sequential ramp or an 11-step diverging one, chroma.js has it; any other step count isn’t documented here as reachable through chroma.js.
What it makes easy
Choosing a palette by the job it has to do — ordered, diverging, or categorical — instead of by eye. This record describes the set as curated for cartography and data visualization, which is a different starting point than dragging a gradient slider until it looks right, though the gathered material doesn’t say more about how that curation was done.
Getting started
The gathered record covers exactly one access route: through chroma.js, as chroma.brewer. It says nothing about ColorBrewer’s own site or tooling, no licence terms for the underlying palette data were found in what was gathered, and nothing here explains how to reach the palettes outside of chroma.js.