A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib | SciPy 2015 | Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt

Why HN readers recommended it

HN's go-to recommendation for colormap and color-perception questions; commenters call it funny, brief, clear and a favorite talk.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Enthought

Topic

perceptual colormaps

Format

talk

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

15

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2015–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• I am not colorblind, but work with data visualization in Matlab a lot. This hilarious SciPy2015 talk[1] convinced me to switch to the Parula color scheme. There's no way I'm going back to Jet. [1] [VIDEO]

• Grrr, why aren't scientists all using perceptually uniforms color schemes! This would still look awesome in `plasma`. Is there any where I can get the data and do it myself? One of my favorite talks ever is on this subject: [VIDEO]

• If you have any interest in this topic, I’d strongly recommend watching this presentation at SciPy 2015 where Viridis and Inferno were first presented, when the developers of Matplotlib were coming up with a new default colormap to replace Jet: [VIDEO] I'd love to see …