Christopher Wesson
The MER Opportunity landing point on Western Arabia Terra
A colour-ramp for the 1:4,000,000 map of the Western Arabia Terra region on Mars by Christopher Wesson for the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain's mapping agency.
In a 2016 blog posting, Christopher Wesson described the design of the colour-ramp:
Starting with the elevation data, I created an initial colour ramp for the base. This was quite difficult. Most printed maps, especially topographic maps from OS, have a white or no background colour. However a white map of a landscape devoid of any woods, bodies of water or manmade features makes for quite an empty map! So instead I considered where we have used layered colouring in the past either on published products such as the OS Tour Map and OS Wall Map series' or on internal projects at larger scales. These coloured backdrops have retained an OS identity by the use of a soft, pastel colour palette that harmoniously sings OS with room left in the colour spectrum for the overlain features to do any shouting or solos.
Bands of colour didn't really have the desired effect so I decided to show a continuous colour ramp based purely on the height of the land from the elevation data to tint the page.
See also the interview in the 2016 posting on the Ordnance Survey blog.
Open Government Licence v3.0: details and XML record.