The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful
Abstract
In this article, we reiterate the characteristics that make the rainbow color map a poor choice, provide examples that clearly illustrate these deficiencies even on simple data sets, and recommend better color maps for several categories of display. The goal is to make the rainbow color map as rare in visualization as the goto statement is in programming - which complicates the task of analyzing and verifying program correctness
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Citations
Cited by
Smolyanskiy, N., Kamenev, A., & Birchfield, S. (2018) · 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW) · doi:10.1109/cvprw.2018.00147 · Cited by 104
Trusting AI: does uncertainty visualization affect decision-making?
Reyes, J., Batmaz, A. U., & Kersten-Oertel, M. (2025) · Frontiers in Computer Science · doi:10.3389/fcomp.2025.1464348 · Cited by 27
Metadata
- Authors
- Borland, D., & Taylor Ii, R. M.
- Venue
- IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
- Published
- 2007-03
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 14-17
- ISSN
- 0272-1716 (ISSN-L)
- 1558-1756
- OpenAlex
- W2031843365
- Cited by
- 488
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 13.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/mcg.2007.323435
- The paper
- Borland, D., & Taylor Ii, R. M. (2007). Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. https://doi.org/10.1109/mcg.2007.323435
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
