Adding Patterns to ggplot2 Plots

Zhenguo Zhang adds some patterns:

Adding patterns to plots is a great way to improve accessibility (making plots colorblind-friendly) and to add an extra dimension of information. The ggpattern package provides a rich set of tools to achieve this in ggplot2.

I’m personally not the biggest fan of patterns. I see them as a point of necessity when dealing with grayscale circumstances, such as printing out a chart in an academic journal. But it’s very easy to overdo patterns and end up making a mess of the visual.

But one side note about color vision deficiency and plots: make sure that your plots are monochrome-friendly because somebody probably will try to print out your chart or view it on a grayscale-only device. Or might actually be monochromatic.