Color

Ben Baumer

Color

Colors can be added to aestheitcs, or for the whole graph.

Type ?geom_point() to see which asthetics are allowed for the point plot

Three color schemes

  • Sequential

    • Single hue
    • Multi-hue

  • Diverging

  • Categorical

Big Idea: color choices matter and there are better and worse choices

Sequential, single hue

Map saturation to numeric variable

No more than 5–6 levels

People interpret high saturation as more

Sequential, double hue

  • Map hue to numeric variable

  • Generally, no more than 2 anchor colors

  • People interpret darker hue as more

Diverging

Two colors used to indicate extremes of a range

Neutral color in the middle

distinguish between zero and missing

Categorical

Different color = different category

choose colors that are - perceptually distant - roughly the same saturation

Built-in color palettes

  • Cynthia Brewer

  • RColorBrewer package

  • scale_color_brewer() function

  • viridis palettes mimic matplotlib Python library

Sorry, no rainbows

dataviz cheatsheet

ggplot2 default color

ColorBrewer Purples palette

ColorBrewer YlGn palette

Viridis palette

Themes

install.packages(“ggthemes”)

Take any ggplot…

…and change themes with ggthemes

More themes