[antovsky]

Indeed, we probably should have compared more directly to Rainbow, I got a bit of this flak on Twitter as well (with my rationale included): https://twitter.com/JamesABednar/status/1163978274361544704?...

The practical issue is that not many people really use Rainbow instead of Jet, for the reasons I mentioned in the article (it sacrifices too many of the 'good bits' of Jet). So instead I chose to compare to the more 'widely recommended' maps.

But you're right, I should have thrown rainbow into the mix, even if I didn't have the space to write about it.

[JBorrow]

Agree with you that the smoother shape leads to a more pleasing colour profile -- note that the `rainbow` cmap in matplotlib is different to the one you compared against, it's actually more similar to Turbo by looks. I would have also compared against other diverging colour maps, like Spectral and those available in `cmocean` (the latter are really beautiful).

All of this said, Turbo is quite pleasing to the eye :).

[antovsky]

Thanks! Indeed there are a few 'rainbow' variants out there (in d3, matplotlib, matlab), and some of them are very pleasant (though I think lower contrast). I personally find it confusing to have 'pink' in a rainbow map. It's not in a real rainbow, and the way I recall the color order is by visualizing that so it trips me up :)

I like Spectral a lot as well. I think if you're not after mega contrast it's probably the best bread-and-butter map out there for this kind of work.