Some Information on Data Visualization

Just a few links to help think about charting and color selection.

Notes
Color blindness need not drive every color palette choice if the graphic is also meaningful rendered without color contrast. Where possible provide either safe colors or strong complimentary visualization. If the objects are not discrete (orange and red palette in a heat map or stacked bar chart).
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1. Sequential schemes are suited to ordered data that progress from low to high. Lightness steps dominate the look of these schemes, with light colors for low data values to dark colors for high data values.

2. Diverging schemes put equal emphasis on mid-range critical values and extremes at both ends of the data range. The critical class or break in the middle of the legend is emphasized with light colors and low and high extremes are emphasized with dark colors that have contrasting hues.
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3. Qualitative schemes do not imply magnitude differences between legend classes, and hues are used to create the primary visual differences between classes. Qualitative schemes are best suited to representing nominal or categorical data.
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Brewer, Cynthia A. 1994. Color use guidelines for mapping and visualization. Chapter 7 (pp. 123-147) in Visualization in Modern Cartograph
Theory
http://blog.visual.ly/the-use-of-yellow-in-data-design/
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~bt/diagrams/papers/diagramsstockholm04.pdf

Technologies
https://plot.ly/plot
http://blog.visual.ly/using-selections-in-d3-to-make-data-driven-visualizations/


Palettes
Look at the color palettes used by classic painters
http://visual.ly/10-artists-10-years-color-palettes
http://colorbrewer2.org/