marienhof / colorgorical

Colorgorical: a tool for creating categorical information visualization color palettes.

Colorgorical

Colorgorical is a tool to make categorical color palettes for information visualizations. Users are able to customize palette design by (1) specifying the number of colors, (2) selecting the importance of discriminability and aesthetic preference, (3) limiting the hues and lightnesses of palette colors, and (4) providing a palette to build off of.

The tool itself runs as a web server. The server is implemented using Tornado and the backend palette construction is implemented using a mixture of NumPy and C. The front-end is minimalistic and only relies on Bootstrap and D3.

For more information about Colorgorical, consult either the inlined docstrings or the paper located in src/public/static/pdf.

Running Colorgorical

After cloning the repo, you first have to compile the C code so that it is usable by Colorgorical. To do so, navigate to /src/model and run python setup.py build_ext --inplace.

Once you have compiled the C code, navigate back to the project's root. The webserver can be called using python run.py --server. If you want to change the port just use --port ####.