These are maps of surface temperature in Europe from July 2023. One of the hottest months ever recorded. You can tell very very different stories by just changing the colourmap. The data and plotting method are identical and yet the two maps cause very different reactions.

You can also just change the intensity of the colours in order to soften the imapct of your visual.

You can also just make mad maps by changing the colours around

These all use the colorcet library in Python. It is a library with loads of cool colourmaps that go way beyond what is available in matplotlib. Easily accessed via

@PythonMaps Just because you can doesn’t mean you should…