Spartan Profiles: Cindy Brewer
COLOR BREWER
Just about anyone can produce a map with available software. But not everyone can find an appropriate color scheme to best relay the information, or to accommodate users with color-deficient vision. Perhaps the leading expert in the use of color in cartography is Cindy Brewer, M.A. ’86, Ph.D. ’91, associate professor of geography at Penn State. T
he most widely published person in this area of the field, Brewer did the color selection for the National Center for Health Statistics’ Atlas of U.S. Mortality and co-authored Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity, both winners of the Blue Pencil Award for best government publications. Science magazine (April 19, 2002) featured her web site, www.colorbrewer.com, where visitors can test a number of color schemes.
“Judy Olson, my advisor at MSU, developed three major categories of color schemes—sequential, diverging and qualitative,” says Cindy. “There are lots within each, but those are the building blocks.”
Born in Evanston, IL, Cindy, an art major and geography minor from Toronto, came to MSU when she discovered that Olson’s research “combined both my interests.” Cindy explains that “much of color work is numerical, where you measure them in three-dimensional spherical spaces and calculate paths and differences.”
When they applied the color concepts to cartography, she notes, “we made color systematic and took the mystery out of it.” Color schemes are especially useful when charting data, such as socio-economic patterns in income and physical trends in precipitation and temperature. “What ColorBrewer does is to give map makers a leg up in making the data visible,” she explains. “Instead of designing one color scheme, you can try out many different versions and see how well they perform with real users.”
