Back in October the Head of the Department of Geography at Penn State, Dr. Cyndi Brewer, was featured in a Wired.com magazine article.
Dr. Brewer has been at Penn State since 1994 and she currently holds an endowed position as the E. Willard Miller and Ruby S. Miller Professor of Geography. Dr. Brewer has written four books and also is an affiliate faculty member at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS).
The Wired article talks about "Brewer’s best-known invention...a website called Color Brewer, which helps mapmakers pick a color scheme that’s well-suited for communicating the particular type of data they’re mapping."