What it does
Palettable is a Python palette library, formerly called brewer2mpl. It gathers collections such as ColorBrewer, Tableau and cmocean behind a shared interface for plotting and other colour work. The code is open source, with notices that must stay with redistributed copies.
Palette names include the colour count: Dark2_7 has seven colours, and adding _r selects its reversed version. A palette object provides RGB values on a 0 to 255 scale, hex strings and Matplotlib-ready RGB values on a 0 to 1 scale.
For separate chart categories, build a ListedColormap from the colour list. The mpl_colormap attribute instead produces a continuous, interpolated map. These outputs serve different types of data.
The core library has no dependencies. Matplotlib is needed for its plotting and image-saving helpers; the block-display helper needs ipythonblocks. The permissive code licence allows modification and redistribution with its copyright and permission notices retained.
Strengths
- Named palette variants include a reversed ordering.
- The same palette object supplies numeric and hex representations.
Watch out for
- Plotting, image saving and block previews require optional dependencies.
Best for
- Python projects switching among established palette collections.
Sources
- Palettable (Oct 28, 2026)
- GitHub - jiffyclub/palettable: Color palettes for Python · GitHub (Oct 28, 2026)
- palettable/license.txt at master · jiffyclub/palettable · GitHub (Oct 28, 2026)