wildlife corridors with a dark red hue — which in the United States is usually asso‑
ciated with danger or poor conditions — when what you really want to convey is
that they represent good conditions for wildlife. Another bad example would be the
use of blue as a fill color for wildlife habitat polygons. The map viewer can easily
interpret those as bodies of water, even if you have a map key that states otherwise.
Interestingly, color connotations are not very consistent across time periods either,
even relatively short time periods. For example, as recently as the early twentieth
century, pink was a color associated with boys while blue was a color associated with
girls. Obviously the opposite is very much the mode now.