Have you ever wondered to which extent you could emulate the beautiful ColorBrewer single hue sequential colour schemes with some form of linear interpolation between the endpoints? Wonder no more!
I made you a d3 example (see here for the gist) comparing the ColorBrewer sequential single hue schemes Blues, Greens, Oranges, Purples and Reds with the d3 L*a*b*, HCL, RGB and HSL interpolators. Click on the image to go to the bl.ock and see all of the colours.
(To my eyes, it looks like the straight-forward, non-perceptual, HSL ordering gives the closest results for most of the schemes.)
You could set d3.range(9) as domain and use the 9 colorbrewer swatches as range. Then choose one of the interpolators. In this way you have the best of both worlds: colorbrewer colors and a continuous scale.
I will post an example bl.ock with an elaborated overview of colorbrewer/d3js comparisons if I have time.
Last year I created the (interactive) comparison. Will be extended with more functionality soon. Enjoy!
http://www.frankvanwijk.nl/datavis/colorbrewer
Awesome, thank you very much for posting here Frank!