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Shell We?*


It’s amazing how every day things can inspire our maps. I recently was looking at my copy of Gift from the Sea, which reminded me of the fact that I have my own seashell collection from our recent trip to Costa Rica. Then I got to thinking about that in connection with the fact that many maps are absolutely beautiful even if they use very little color or color variation. Well, so are shells!

Here are some of the shells, arranged by a professional. But not really. Okay, my secret was to stand on a chair and take their picture, after having put them on a black shelf. You can see that they all look fairly uniform in color. However, when I used my color-picker software to get the RGBs (It’s called “Amazing Screen Color Picker” – anything that says it is amazing must be so, right?!), you could see that there are quite a few nuances in the colors and one could make a very nice map color scheme out of these. And of course that is exactly what I did. Here are the colors:


In RGB triplets, in the order you see them, they are:

214 222 225

222 236 245

170 148 137

224 207 213

166 147 167

You can also view the palette and the HEX equivalents, here.

*Full credit for the pun goes to Kris.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2010, 11:21 pm and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. #1 by Erik Kingfisher on September 16, 2010 - 12:46 am

    This is so great – I really appreciate this creative and artistic reflection on how we can improve the ‘natural’ colors of our maps, and for sharing the RGB triplets.

  2. #2 by Gretchen on September 16, 2010 - 3:10 pm

    Thanks! I am glad you are gaining some inspiration. If you have any ideas concerning natural colors, etc., let me know.

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