Artistic Palette

The Artistic palette is different from all the other palettes supported by MapLink Pro Studio in that it consists exclusively of named colours. For convenience the colours are arranged using the same representation structure as for the HSV and Pastel palettes, but no attempt is made to preserve the integrity of any specific colour space.

Named colours have the property that they collectively provide a very good degree of colour discrimination; they are the colours of sufficient usefulness to have been granted their own names over a period of centuries. Their distribution is highly non-uniform in RGB space: there are nearly as many named colours with red-yellow hues as there are of all other hues put together. For this reason, the palette is arranged as follows:

The left half of the palette is dedicated to red-yellow hues, with angles ranging from about 330 (pinks) through 0 (reds) to about 60 (yellows) on the colour wheel).
The right half of the palette is filled with colours from the other angles on the colour wheel.
The arrangement of colours within each half of the palette is based on the hue and intensity, with the lighter colours being placed towards the centre in the left half, and towards the edges in the right half. This should be seen as pleasing and useful groupings of colours, such as an artist would produce on his palette, rather than as attempts to impose strict order.
Some greyish colours are placed by default in the user-defined colour area. These can of course be modified or deleted if preferred.

Up to 40 user-defined colours are available.

When to use the Artistic Palette

You should use the Artistic palette under the following circumstances:

If you wish to define some of your own colours. The HSV and Pastel palettes also support user-defined colours.
If you do not have to worry about colour depth issues on the target platforms, for example if you know that the maps will not be deployed in web browsers. Use the Web Safe palette otherwise.
If you have been given a map presentation specification that uses named colours.