Chromatic Cartography

The Idea

What if every place on Earth had its own unique color? Not based on what it looks like, but on where it is — a color identity derived purely from geographic coordinates.

The Right Color Space

The familiar RGB space was designed for screens, not for human eyes. Equal steps in RGB don’t look equally different to us. The HCL color space (Hue-Chroma-Luminance) fixes this — it’s designed so that equidistant colors look equidistant. Its three dimensions:

• Hue — position on the color wheel (red, yellow, green…)
• Chroma — saturation, how vivid the color is
• Luminance — perceived brightness

And crucially, HCL can be represented as a sphere — just like Earth.

The Mapping

Both systems are spherical, so the mapping is natural:

• Longitude → Hue (east-west position determines the color)
• Latitude → Luminance (north is bright, south is dark)
• Altitude → Chroma (higher elevations are more saturated, depths are greyer)

Mount Everest gets a vivid color. The Mariana Trench, almost grey. Paris and Tokyo sit at similar latitudes but different longitudes — similar brightness, different hues.

Color Atlas

Eleven locations around the world, each shown as its unique color: