Simon Jackson has a couple posts on how to use ggplot2 to make graphs prettier. First, histograms:
Time to jazz it up with colour! The method I’ll present was motivated by my answer to this StackOverflow question.
We can add colour by exploiting the way that ggplot2 stacks colour for different groups. Specifically, we fill the bars with the same variable (
x) butcutinto multiple categories:
Then he follows up with scatter plots:
Shape and size
There are many ways to tweak the
shapeandsizeof the points. Here’s the combination I settled on for this post:
There are some nice tricks here around transparency, color scheme, and gradients, making it a great series. As a quick note, this color scheme in the histogram headliner photo does not work at all for people with red-green color-blindness. Using a URL color filter like Toptal’s is quite helpful in discovering these sorts of issues.