I started creating my own colormaps during my Ph.D. in the second half of the 90's, for visualizing the propagation of light into optical waveguides. I had for example a gray colormap in normal and inverted contrast, which was better for showing weak features. I had also colormaps built using gaussians centered at different positions for the intensity of red, green, blue. And I accumulated a few more along the years, but they were naive colormaps.
In 2005, I read the web article “Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color?” by Rogowitz and Treinish, which was then available on an IBM website. It was interesting but I did not dig further.
At Fall 2023, I discovered the "Scientific Colour Maps" collection published by Fabio Crameri and decided to import those 222 colormaps in a Fortran module. The first commit of ForColormap dates back to October 21, 2023. And the first release (numbered 0.8) of ForColormap was announced two days later on the Fortran Discourse. I was quickly joined by @gha3mi and the development accelerated. In January 2024, @aslozada designed a logo for the project and @jchristopherson added the CMake support. The version 0.9 was released in March 2024.
In March 2026, we released the 1.0 version.