Visualizing Innovation

Colors

Dr. Matthias Schnetzer

October 30, 2023

All colours are beautiful

Colors in R

You can assign colors by names

• “red”, “green”, “chocolate”, “cadetblue”, etc.
• See a complete list of the 657 colors typing colors()

 [1] "white"         "aliceblue"     "antiquewhite"  "antiquewhite1"
 [5] "antiquewhite2" "antiquewhite3" "antiquewhite4" "aquamarine"   
 [9] "aquamarine1"   "aquamarine2"   "aquamarine3"   "aquamarine4"  

Alternatively, you can use hex color codes

• #F8766D, #00BA38, #619CFF, etc.
• Use color picker to get hex code, e.g. https://htmlcolorcodes.com

Color palettes of {RColorBrewer}

Sequential

Use to encode numerical information with order

Diverging

Use to encode numerical information with critical midpoint

Qualitative

Use to encode categorical information

Source: Scherer (2022)

Color blindness

You may check whether the color scale works for people who can distinguish fewer colours than others with {colorBlindness}.

The viridis color scale is discriminable under the most common forms of colour blindness, and reproduces well in greyscale.

Fancy palettes

{MetBrewer}

{wesanderson}

Color scales in {ggplot}

scale_color_*
scale_fill_*

Continuous:

• continuous(type)
• distiller(palette)
• gradient(high, low)
• gradient2(high, mid, low)
• gradientn(colours)
• viridis_c(option)

Discrete:

• manual(values)
• brewer(palette)
• grey(start, end)
• viridis_d(option)

Bibliography

Scherer, Cédric (2022). Graphic design with ggplot2. https://rstudio-conf-2022.github.io/ggplot2-graphic-design/