Yesterday in our discussion of easy ways to improve your graphs, a commenter wrote:
I recently read and enjoyed several articles about alternatives to the rainbow color palette. I particularly like the sections where they show how each color scheme looks under different forms of color-blindness and/or in black and white.
Here’s a couple of them (these are R-centric but relevant beyond that):
The viridis color palettes, by Bob Rudis, Noam Ross and Simon Garnier
Somewhere over the Rainbow, by Ross Ihaka, Paul Murrell, Kurt Hornik, Jason Fisher, Reto Stauffer, Claus Wilke, Claire McWhite, and Achim Zeileis.
I particularly like that second article, which includes lots of examples.