Id actually suggest this video: https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU More than that website. Since this gives a better explanation of which colormap to use More on reddit.com

The authors page on the colourmap A more in depth explanation of it's benefits You'll see in those pages that there's a few more colourmaps in the same package, but I only made Viridis because it's the only one I wanted to use. The viridis package brings to R color scales created by Stéfan van der Walt and Nathaniel Smith for the Python matplotlib library. These color scales are designed to be: Colorful, spanning as wide a palette as possible so as to make differences easy to see, Perceptually uniform, meaning that values close to each other have similar-appearing colors and values far away from each other have more different-appearing colors, consistently across the range of values, Robust to colorblindness, so that the above properties hold true for people with common forms of colorblindness, as well as in grey scale printing, and Pretty, oh so pretty EDIT: Looks like I ruffled some feathers with a bad title. Rainbow colourmaps can have use, however they have flaws which make them IMO not suitable for a default option that many people won't bother to deviate from (and those people are probably not the ones you want reading misleading maps). STAR-CCM+'s default rainbow map could be done as perfectly as it possible could for all I know, but I made a thing and would like to share it in hopes it helps someone. As an analogy: Say your solution data is the scene of a crime, and the colourmap is the witness you're questioning. Each map will have it's own personality, some will be a little eccentric, some will create details that aren't there, and some will over embellish some facts while downplaying others. Now, each of these witnesses will have their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of what it can tell you, and these strenths/weaknesses may be better or worse depending on the type of crime committed. In this, Viridis and its siblings are trusty, it wont mislead you, but it wont give you any specific facts that you might be looking to hear. When you have an inexperienced detective on the scene of a crime, do you want the first person they talk to to be one of the characters, or to the person that will do a good job of giving them the basics but not much else? Note that this new detective might not know to question the reliability of their witness. You as the experienced detective, maybe you know exactly who you want to talk to right away, but that's because you know how to make them sing like a bird. Not everybody has that ability, so why not recommend detectives first talk to the person who will give them the basics before they talk to someone that might mislead them? More on reddit.com