[jostmey]

As someone who has put together figures for a scientific paper, I can safely say that the last thing I want are a wide-range of colors to use. Many people are color-blind, and many people print on black & white printers. So when I design the figures, I stick with pure colors. Pure red (255,0,0) or pure green (0,255,0) or pure blue (0,0,255). I suppose it would be smarter to design a set of color codes where even if someone were missing one of the three color receptors in their eye, they would still be able to discern each individual color as distinct. Perhaps (128,128,0), (128,0,128), (0,128,128).

[cscheid]

This will sound snarky, but there's just too much that's wrong with this comment to let it stand. For people reading this: please don't do any the above.

Go here for good color scales and spare yourself the risk of getting it all wrong: http://colorbrewer2.org

If you're going to not use colorbrewer, please, either know what you're doing (and if you're reading this comment, you don't) you either stick with black and white, or you at least use orange and blue (orange and blue is a combination that's safe with most common types of color-blindness, and also tends to separate well in black-and-white conversions).

Just as importantly: don't try to guess what colors look like for colorblind people, either (and don't do it in RGB space like the original post suggested either! RGB is a device-centric coordinate system; please use something like Lab or Luv). The rightest, simplest way to simulate different types of color blindness is to use define 2D affine subspaces of Lab space, like here: http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/%7Eoliveira/pubs_files/CVD_Mass_Spri... (figure 2, in page 3)

[paulgb]

Are there any particular resources you'd recommend on getting to know this stuff?

[cbr]

Unless you're staying on a computer your 'pure colors' aren't really pure.

And pure green (0,255,0) is really unpleasant.