- Printing in black and white
- Color blindness
- Sequential color palettes
- Diverging color palettes
- Qualitative color palettes
- Canva palettes
- Palettetown palettes
Blogposts and other resources
Here is a collection of material on the use and creation of color palettes in r.
- Creating corporate colour palettes for ggplot2
- Make your own color palettes with paletti
- How to create a color palette in R with more than 15 colors with ggplot2
- Generating a Custom Color Palette Function in R
- How to build a color palette from any image with R and k-means algo
- Why choice of colour is important beyond aesthetic considerations and how the quality of a palette might be assessed
- Viz palette: colors in action
Color manipulation packages
- Extract palettes from images and text
- Fast Vectorised Colour Conversion and Comparison
- How to Read, Inspect, and Manipulate Color Swatch Files
- Simple colour manipulation in R
Generative packages
The purpose of this project is to showcase the palettes already available in R (packages). However sometimes you have to resort to make one yourself. When that is the case the following packages aides in creating.
- AndreaCirilloAC/paletter
- jolars/qualpalr
- ronammar/randomcoloR
- johnbaums/hues
- ColorPalette
- oaColors
- earthtones
- leeper/colourlovers
When creating color palettes certain website have also provided valuable
Perception of color palettes
Selecting a color palette requires a number of different considerations. Within these considerations is
- the palette retains its integrity when printed in black and white
- people with colorblindness are able to understand it
In the following I have outlined a couple of those problems
Printing in black and white
While most of the palettes presented here contains a wide variety of colors. While that is compelling, you need to remember that your product might be printed in black and white one day, and you should pick a palette that allows for interpretation if that is the case.
First example is the rainbow palette from the grDevices package with its colorful display. However as we see here would it be horrible if used for black and white printing since different colors are mapped to the same shade of grey.
A related problem happens with the standard color palette used in ggplot2 since that color is picked to have constant chroma and luminance thus yielding the same shade of grey when desaturated. (This palette is no longer the default for continuous variables in ggplot2 after version 3.0.0)
One of the continuous palette that satisfy this criteria is the well known viridis palettes.
To test if the palette you want to use will be distorted when in black and white, use the colorspace::desaturate() to desaturate it.
Color blindness
Another thing you have to take into consideration when picking a palette is how it would be viewed by a person who is color blind. To visualize the effect of color blindness on our palettes we will turn to two packages. The dichromat package can simulate color blindness on individual color and then also entire palettes like so in this rainbow palette:
Another package that can provide helpful is the amazing colorblindr package that is able to simulate color blindness to ggplot objects them self.
Honorable mentions
Due to the somehow vague notion of βcolor paletteβ have I decided to exclude certain kinds of packages from the main gallery. Generative package have been discussed earlier.
cpt-city
The amazing cpt-city is a wonderful project of creating an archive of color palettes to be used in cartography, technical illustration and design. Due to the immense size (7140) I have decided to refer to it instead of re-illustration them in this repository. If any of the palettes found here are for your liking they can be accessed in R using the following package:
# CRAN version install.packages("cptcity")
sport colors
Many of the palettes in sports related palettes have a very limited number of colors (often only 2 colors). This leads to quite low usability outside of the special area of sports analytic.
- colorr Color palettes for EPL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL teams.
- beanumber/teamcolors An R package providing color palettes for pro sports teams.
Canva palettes
The ggthemes package include the 150 four-color palettes from the canva.com. Due to the size and limited number of colors in the palettes these palettes will be featured on their own page and only once.
Palettes sorted by Package (alphabetically)
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("awhstin/awtools")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("riatelab/cartography") # CRAN version install.packages("cartography")
# CRAN version install.packages("dichromat")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("EdwinTh/dutchmasters")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("road2stat/ggsci") # CRAN version install.packages("ggsci")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("gadenbuie/ggpomological")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("jrnold/ggthemes") # CRAN version install.packages("ggthemes")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("ewenme/ghibli") # CRAN version install.packages("ghibli")
# CRAN version install.packages("grDevices")
the jcolors continuous palettes are currently not available in the paletteer package.
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("jaredhuling/jcolors") # CRAN version install.packages("jcolors")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("johannesbjork/LaCroixColoR")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("m-clark/NineteenEightyR")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("jkaupp/nord") # CRAN version install.packages("nord")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("ropenscilabs/ochRe") # CRAN version install.packages("ochRe")
# CRAN version install.packages("oompaBase")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("timcdlucas/palettetown") # CRAN version install.packages("palettetown")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("AustralianAntarcticDivision/palr") # CRAN version install.packages("palr")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("kwstat/pals") # CRAN version install.packages("pals")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("kwstat/pals") # CRAN version install.packages("pals")
# CRAN version install.packages("Polychrome")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("EmilHvitfeldt/quickpalette")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("Nowosad/rcartocolor") # CRAN version install.packages("rcartocolor")
# CRAN version install.packages("RColorBrewer")
# CRAN version install.packages("Redmonder")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("alyssafrazee/RSkittleBrewer")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("thomasp85/scico") # CRAN version install.packages("scico")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("sjmgarnier/viridis") # CRAN version install.packages("viridis")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("karthik/wesanderson") # CRAN version install.packages("wesanderson")
# Developmental version devtools::install_github("ndphillips/yarrr") # CRAN version install.packages("yarrr")
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Comprehensive list of color palettes available in R β€οΈπ§‘ππππ
