[yt-dev] Default colormap

[Matthew Turk]

Hi folks,

For a long time we've used "algae," which was designed by Britton
about eight years ago, as the default colormap.  This has been really
nice for "branding" yt -- if you see an algae plot, it's probably (not
definitely) made with yt.  But it's also not accessible from a
colorblindness perspective.  Stefan van der Walt has been giving some
really great talks lately about building a better colormap for
matplotlib (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU ) which
culminated in viridis, which is shipping in recent versions of
matplotlib and will become the default.

In support of this, he built a tool called viscm which can generate
reduced versions of colormaps to show what they would be like with
varying degrees of insensitivity to color.  I've generated outputs
from viscm of three of the custom colormaps we ship with yt:

Algae: https://images.hub.yt/u/fido/m/d275d5e1-png/
Cubehelix: https://images.hub.yt/u/fido/m/8e698928-png/ (I believe
this is now also shipped with MPL)
Kamae: https://images.hub.yt/u/fido/m/e0e40efa-png/

I love algae, but it's not the best from an accessibility perspective.

I'd like to propose that we use a new default colormap.  If we do
this, I see two options:

 * Retain a "branding" by developing a new one either by using the
techniques used by matplotlib (or one of the maps they opted not to
use) or by modifying algae to be more accessible; looking at the
response functions, I suspect it would be reasonably possible to
modify it.  (Modifying algae is my preference.)
 * Use viridis (which we may then have to ship if we have older
versions of matplotlib to support)

-Matt
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