Limited Color Palette?

Beatriz

Gone Fishin'
Does it make sense to use a limited color palette for maps?
The problem is twofold - 1) ease of selecting colors and their shades from paint 2) ease of telling colors apart

This is the default MS paint list:
IMG_2351.jpeg


Just sticking to 19 colors and their shades at 25% luminosity should do it.

Trouble Brewing by Bruce Munro uses these principal colors for nine major empires
  • Britain - red
  • Holland - Orange
  • Japan - yellow
  • France - blue
  • Spain - grayblue
  • Russia - Green
  • Austria - purple
  • Portugal - light brown
  • Prussia - grey
 
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Nik

If you simply wish to distinguish borders, four (4) ) colours will usually do.

Legible is harder: Consider how difficult to colour-code wires to be 'Murphy Resistant'. You'll probably need stripes atop the major shade. (*)
Another level of 'WTF' added if you want your map / graphic to still make sense in 'B&W' version. Technical text-books and meetings reports often put a 'B&W' version in-line, so you gotta go hunt the matching colour 'plate'...

*) We discovered one of our techs was partly colour-blind when he took off a re-wireable power plug to 'mouse-hole' that instrument's cable through bench-top fume-hood's port. The instrument was Euro, the port was sized for a Euro plug. Its retro-fitted chunky, fused UK plug was much, much too big.. Being Euro, cable's three cores were clearly, but single colour clad. UK's equivalent has stripes to disambiguate L-E-N, to be sure, to be sure...
'Pop' went that zone's breaker...
Fortunately, I was first on scene, was able to diagnose and resolve without dropping the guy in unnecessary ordure...
 
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