Custom ggplot2 Subplots

Ilya Kashnitsky shows how to create custom subplots using ggplot2:

Actually, ggplot2 is a very powerful and flexible tool that allows to draw figures with quite a complex layout. Today I want to show the code that aligns six square plots (actually, maps) just as in the figure above. And it’s all about the handy function ggplot2::annotation_custom(). Since I used the layout more than once, I wrapped the code that produced it into a function that takes a list of 6 square plots as an input and yields the arranged figure with arrows as an output. Here is the commented code of the function.

This is the difference between “I’m just going to throw some stuff on there” (which is how I tend to operate) versus well thought out visual layout.