Beautiful presentation about the viridis colormap

«I like the way colors taste. Except I don’t like crimsons … or turquoises …especially when they put their heads into their shells and won’t play and when you break their shells to let them out they die …»
Delirium, in «Sandman: The Wake» by Neil Gaiman

When it comes to colors, many people use the default colors, e.g., in Excel or in R. But there are ways to use colors to represent data more accurately («perceptually uniform»). For example, with the viridis colormap.

The very, very well done presentation «A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib» by Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt at the SciPy 2015 conference shows why and how.

BTW, if you use R, simply use the viridis package with its scale_color_viridis or scale_fill_viridis functions. Although there are multiple other ways to use viridis in R.