I'll try and make this. beginner cs undergrad looking for maps-based things to build. if anyone can reply and hit me with tips, quick info, or just a laundry list of things I'd be wise to google & learn to use, please lmk thanks!
Digital mapmakers often have a hard time getting color scales right; it's common to just sort of wing it and end up with something that looks like crap and/or doesn't work well with the nature of the dataset.
I'd recommend using one of the tried and tested scales from ColorBrewer (https://colorbrewer2.org). Great info there to help you decide.
And when you do pick a scale, Chroma.js (https://www.vis4.net/chromajs) is a fantastic color library that has built-in support for ColorBrewer scales.
Also http://turfjs.org has some great tools for manipulating GeoJSON.
