MSc Final presentation Title : Synthesis of Color Palettes Speaker: Martijn Wijffelaars Date : Wednesday March 5, 2008 Time : 14:00-14:45 Place : HG 6.05a Abstract Color is widely used in data visualization to encode data values. The proper selection of colors is critical to convey information correctly. Experts can achieve optimal results by carefully hand-picking colors; for non-experts this is often too difficult and time consuming. This presentation focuses on a new color palette generation technique. To generate a set of colors, the CIELUV color space is used. This is a perceptually more uniform color space than the commonly used color spaces RGB, HSV or HLS. An interactive tool was developed to explore the peculiarities of the CIELUV color space and to analyze existing color palettes and generation methods. This has led to a method of palette generation that is based on a sampled curve through color space. Instead of defining a palette by color keys, it is specified using a set of meaningful parameters. The palette generation methods are integrated in the visualization tool MagnaView.