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There has been a huge amount of previous work on colormaps in visualization, this is just a tiny sampling.

All of this previous work establishes the basic principles and heuristics that we should keep in mind when using color to display information. Basically, the goal is to align the important variables in the underlying data with the natural axes of color perception, so that we can easily and intuitively perceive the basic structure and variation within the data.

Perceptual psychology tells us that in most circumstances, luminance is the dominant axis in color perception.