I would also be for coming up with our own colormap. That said, I think simply modifying algae won't be enough, since it is too perceptually nonlinear.

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 10:32 AM, John ZuHone <jzuhone@gmail.com> wrote:
I would go for modifying algae.

> On Jan 6, 2016, at 11:30 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> For a long time we've used "algae," which was designed by Britton
> about eight years ago, as the default colormap.  This has been really
> nice for "branding" yt -- if you see an algae plot, it's probably (not
> definitely) made with yt.  But it's also not accessible from a
> colorblindness perspective.  Stefan van der Walt has been giving some
> really great talks lately about building a better colormap for
> matplotlib (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU ) which
> culminated in viridis, which is shipping in recent versions of
> matplotlib and will become the default.
>
> In support of this, he built a tool called viscm which can generate
> reduced versions of colormaps to show what they would be like with
> varying degrees of insensitivity to color.  I've generated outputs
> from viscm of three of the custom colormaps we ship with yt:
>
> Algae: https://images.hub.yt/u/fido/m/d275d5e1-png/
> Cubehelix: https://images.hub.yt/u/fido/m/8e698928-png/ (I believe
> this is now also shipped with MPL)
> Kamae: https://images.hub.yt/u/fido/m/e0e40efa-png/
>
> I love algae, but it's not the best from an accessibility perspective.
>
> I'd like to propose that we use a new default colormap.  If we do
> this, I see two options:
>
> * Retain a "branding" by developing a new one either by using the
> techniques used by matplotlib (or one of the maps they opted not to
> use) or by modifying algae to be more accessible; looking at the
> response functions, I suspect it would be reasonably possible to
> modify it.  (Modifying algae is my preference.)
> * Use viridis (which we may then have to ship if we have older
> versions of matplotlib to support)
>
> -Matt
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