Nicola Rennie busts out the beret and fancy palette board:
Choosing which colours to use in a plot is an important design decision. A good choice of colour palette can highlight important aspects of your data, but a poor choice can make it impossible to interpret correctly. There are numerous colour palette R packages out there that are already compatible with {ggplot2}. For example, the {RColorBrewer} or {viridis} packages are both widely used.
If you regularly make plots at work, it’s great to have them be consistent with your company’s branding. Maybe you’re already doing this manually with the
scale_colour_manual()function in {ggplot2} but it’s getting a bit tedious? Or maybe you just want your plots to look a little bit prettier? This blog post will show you how to make a basic colour palette that is compatible with {ggplot2}. It assumes you have some experience with {ggplot2} – you know your geoms from your aesthetics.
Click through to see how you can build a palette and use it across multiple ggplot2 charts.