Abstract: | Nominal color coding is the aesthetic and functional use of color to convey qualitative information in graphical environments. The specification of high‐contrast color sets is a fundamental step in this process. We formulate the color‐coding problem here as a combinatorial optimization problem on graphs and present an algorithm that performs well and does not require that the function used to code the similarity between colors be a distance function. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Col Res Appl, 24, 132–138, 1999 |