What are Paul Tol's bright scheme hex codes?

The bright scheme is blue 4477AA, red EE6677, green 228833, yellow CCBB44, cyan 66CCEE, purple AA3377, and grey BBBBBB. It is the general purpose colorblind safe default among Tol's schemes.

Which Tol scheme should I use for black and white printing?

Use the high contrast scheme. It contains black 000000, blue 004488, red BB5566, yellow DDAA33, and white FFFFFF, and it is built around lightness differences so the ordering survives grayscale conversion.

How many colors can I use from the muted scheme?

The muted scheme provides nine usable category colors plus pale grey DDDDDD, which is reserved for missing or excluded data. Using the pale grey as an ordinary category removes a useful convention.

Are Paul Tol's schemes better than Okabe-Ito?

Neither is strictly better. Okabe Ito is more widely recognized in the life sciences, while Tol offers several schemes tuned to different jobs and reaches ten categories in the muted set.

Where do Paul Tol's color schemes come from?

They were published in a technical note at SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, and are implemented in libraries such as khroma for R and tol colors for Python.

Can I mix colors from different Tol schemes?

Avoid it. Each scheme is balanced internally for separation and lightness, and combining colors across schemes breaks those guarantees, which is exactly the property that makes them colorblind safe.

Paul Tol Color Schemes: Hex Codes Reference

Paul Tol's schemes are colorblind-safe palettes built for scientific plots.

They come from a technical note published at SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, and they are unusual in that each scheme is designed for a specific job: maximum separation, maximum contrast, high saturation, or many categories at once. Picking the right one is mostly a matter of knowing which job you have.

Four rows of Paul Tol swatches labeled bright, high contrast, vibrant, and muted, each colour annotated with its name and hex code (Tol swatch chart rendered by SciFig)

The Four Colorblind-Safe Schemes

Bright (7 colors)

The general-purpose default. Good separation without the harshness of fully saturated colors.

Name	Hex
Blue	`#4477AA`
Red	`#EE6677`
Green	`#228833`
Yellow	`#CCBB44`
Cyan	`#66CCEE`
Purple	`#AA3377`
Grey	`#BBBBBB`

High contrast (5 colors)

For figures that must survive black-and-white printing, and for readers with severe deficiency. Includes black and white as endpoints.

Name	Hex
Black	`#000000`
Blue	`#004488`
Red	`#BB5566`
Yellow	`#DDAA33`
White	`#FFFFFF`

Vibrant (7 colors)

Higher saturation than bright. Better for thin lines, small markers, and presentation slides viewed at a distance.

Name	Hex
Orange	`#EE7733`
Blue	`#0077BB`
Cyan	`#33BBEE`
Magenta	`#EE3377`
Red	`#CC3311`
Teal	`#009988`
Grey	`#BBBBBB`

Muted (10 colors)

The largest colorblind-safe set here. Lower saturation, which keeps a busy figure calm. The pale grey is reserved for missing or excluded data.

Name	Hex
Rose	`#CC6677`
Indigo	`#332288`
Sand	`#DDCC77`
Green	`#117733`
Cyan	`#88CCEE`
Wine	`#882255`
Teal	`#44AA99`
Olive	`#999933`
Purple	`#AA4499`
Pale grey	`#DDDDDD`

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Choosing Between Them

If your figure is…	Use	Why
A standard plot with 3-7 series	Bright	Balanced separation, not harsh
Printed in black and white	High contrast	Designed around lightness, includes black and white
Thin lines or a projected slide	Vibrant	Saturation survives distance and low-quality projection
Dense with 8-10 categories	Muted	Largest safe set, low saturation keeps it calm

Two conventions in the muted scheme are worth respecting. The pale grey #DDDDDD is reserved for missing, excluded, or not-applicable data — using it as an ordinary category color removes a useful signal. And the grey #BBBBBB in bright and vibrant plays the same role for a residual "other" category.

A line plot with seven series in Tol bright, and the same plot in Tol vibrant, showing how saturation affects readability at thin line widths (Comparison figure generated with SciFig)

Copy-Ready Code

Python

TOL_BRIGHT = ["#4477AA", "#EE6677", "#228833", "#CCBB44",
              "#66CCEE", "#AA3377", "#BBBBBB"]
import matplotlib as mpl
mpl.rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] = mpl.cycler(color=TOL_BRIGHT)

The tol-colors package exposes all schemes directly if you prefer not to hard-code them.

R

tol_bright <- c("#4477AA", "#EE6677", "#228833", "#CCBB44",
                "#66CCEE", "#AA3377", "#BBBBBB")
scale_colour_manual(values = tol_bright)

The khroma package provides scale_colour_tol() and related helpers.

A Tol high-contrast line plot shown in colour and in grayscale, demonstrating that the ordering survives print (Figure generated with SciFig)

Tol or Okabe-Ito?

Both are colorblind-safe qualitative sets, and for most figures either works. The practical differences:

Okabe-Ito is the more widely recognized standard in the life sciences, largely because of its Nature Methods exposure. If a reviewer asks which accessible palette you used, naming it needs no explanation.
Tol gives you a choice of schemes for different jobs, and the muted scheme reaches ten categories where Okabe-Ito stops at eight.

If you have no strong reason either way, use Okabe-Ito for life sciences and Tol bright for physical sciences and engineering, where it is the more common convention. Our color palette guide covers how both fit alongside sequential and diverging choices.

Tip

Whichever scheme you pick, use it consistently across every figure in a manuscript. Readers learn a color mapping over the course of a paper, and re-assigning the same color to a different group between figures costs more comprehension than any palette choice gains.

A multi-panel figure using Tol muted consistently across four panels with a shared legend (Figure generated with SciFig)

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To apply a scheme without hand-editing every series, the scientific color palette generator builds figures against these constraints, and figure enhancer recolors existing artwork.

Paul Tol Color Schemes: Hex Codes Reference