I admire the color scheme in the New York Times Games section and occasionally make it my colororder.

https://www.nytco.com/games

Contents

Colormaps

It is important to distinguish between "color map" and "color order". A colormap defines the colors used by surface, image, and patch objects. MATLAB provides 22 color maps. parula is the default.

    disp(colormaps)

    "parula"
    "turbo"
    "hsv"
    "hot"
    "cool"
    "spring"
    "summer"
    "autumn"
    "winter"
    "gray"
    "bone"
    "copper"
    "pink"
    "sky"
    "abyss"
    "nebula"
    "jet"
    "lines"
    "colorcube"
    "prism"
    "flag"
    "white"

Palettes

The colormap defines the palette of colors used by the plot function for multiple lines. MATLAB provides 10 palettes. gem is the default.

     disp(palettes')

    "gem"
    "gem12"
    "glow"
    "glow12"
    "sail"
    "reef"
    "meadow"
    "dye"
    "earth"
    "default"

Color Order

The colors used by MATLAB for plotting multiple lines need to be well separated. These colors are given by the colororder property of the current axes. By default, MATLAB cycles through the seven colors in the gem palette.

    gcaco = get(gca,"ColorOrder");
    show_rgb(gcaco)

    close all
    clear

New York Times Games

The New York Times Games originated with the newspaper's crossword puzzle in 1942. NYT Games was established in 2014, with the addition of the Mini Crossword. Wordle was added in 2022 and I have been playing Wordle almost daily since its launch.

NYT Games now has over 10 million daily players. According to one member of staff, "the half joke that is repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news."

NYT Color Order

I like the color scheme that the Times uses in the Games section. It provides a subtler color order than the default gem.

    nyt_palette

ans =
   184   228    68
   248   211     0
   121   160   238
   184   113   19
   160    82    45
   235   235   200

    nytco = nyt_palette/256
    ribbon(6)
    set(gcf,'position',[200 200 440 300])
    set(gca,'colororder',nytco)
    drawnow

nytco =
    0.7188    0.8906    0.2656
    0.9688    0.8242         0
    0.4727    0.6250    0.9297
    0.7188    0.4414    0.7734
    0.6250    0.3203    0.1758
    0.9180    0.9180    0.7812

    show_rgb(nytco)
    drawnow

Tangrams

In October, I used NYT colors for the kitty in my blog post about Tangrams.

NYT Qube

The NYT colors give the Rubiks Cube a new look.

Gallery

The MiniGallerya with NYT colors.

The Fast Finite Fourier Matrix with the NYT colors.

Published with MATLAB® R2025b