As I was preparing some graphics for a presentation recently, I started digging into some of the different color palette options. My motivation was entirely about creating graphics that weren’t too visually overwhelming, which I found the default “rainbow” palette to be.

But as the creators of the viridis R package point out, we also need to think about how people with colorblindness might struggle with understanding graphics. If you create figures in R, I highly recommend checking it out at the link above!