When it comes to choosing color maps, we have a near infinite set of choices available to us, so it makes a lot of sense to think about the theory of why certain color maps are designed in the way they are.

A classic paper on the theory of Choosing a Colour Sequence for Univariate Maps was published by Colin Ware over 30 years ago. In this paper, Dr. Ware defines two different important things to think about when choosing a color map:

• How a color map conveys the metric value of individual points within the image
• How that color map conveys form—the shape of the different points interacting within each other