The fishpals package provides fish-inspired color palettes and some
lightweight ggplot themes that we hope will be especially useful to
scientists when preparing reports, presentations, and publications.
fishpals is trivial, so it’s unlikely to ever be submitted to CRAN.
You can install it using either devtools::install_github() or the
install_github function from the remotes package:
devtools::install_github("fishsciences/fishpals", build_vignettes = TRUE)
library(fishpals)To see all the palettes included in the fishpals package, use
getpals():
getpals()
#> [1] "adultchinook" "adultsteelhead" "cfs" "genidaqs"
#> [5] "greensunfish" "juvsteelhead" "surgewrasse"To view a particular palette, call it by name with viewpals()
viewpals("surgewrasse")
To see a full list of all the colors in each palette, use
get_fishpals_cols():
get_fishpals_cols()
#> juvsteel green juvsteel taupe juvsteel grey
#> "#A3C595" "#BA8F78" "#5D5360"
#> juvsteel jungle green juvsteel tuscan red adultsteel dark liver
#> "#1c240d" "#784039" "#504C41"
#> adultsteel red ochre adultsteel gray adultsteel feldgrau
#> "#E2704D" "#B8BABD" "#4B5859"
#> adultsteel spanish bistre chinook red chinook olive
#> "#707239" "#BA1D57" "#8DAD6E"
#> chinook dark gray chinook blue chinook pink
#> "#273535" "#0C4FA0" "#EFB0A1"
#> sunfish green sunfish tan sunfish yellow
#> "#4EC4B8" "#8C7A4B" "#F1B24A"
#> sunfish gray sunfish dark gray CFS blue
#> "#636271" "#2D3040" "#1372AA"
#> CFS dark gray CFS gridlines CFS tan
#> "#3B4856" "#9FADBD" "#8B662E"
#> CFS light tan CFS teal genidaqs yellow
#> "#C3985E" "#1CD2A3" "#FAFF6B"
#> genidaqs blue genidaqs brown genidaqs green
#> "#2597C4" "#3A3737" "#6CFC95"
#> genidaqs pink surgewrasse orange surgewrasse teal
#> "#CA5B97" "#E24D4D" "#1C5B67"
#> surgewrasse green surgewrasse blue surgewrasse purple
#> "#B6DD18" "#12DAF6" "#966480"fishpals is designed to integrate with ggplot2 code, and so provides
two ggplot2 scale functions for displaying its custom color palettes.
To use them, map a variable to a color aesthetic and call the
appropriate scale function: scale_fill_fishpals() or
scale_color_fishpals():
ggplot(warpbreaks) +
geom_boxplot(aes(x = wool,
y = breaks,
color = wool,
fill = wool),
alpha = 0.5,
width = 0.5,
show.legend = FALSE) +
facet_wrap(~tension,
labeller = labeller(tension =
c("L" = "Low",
"M" = "Medium",
"H" = "High")
)) +
scale_color_fishpals(discrete = TRUE) +
scale_fill_fishpals(discrete = TRUE) +
labs(x = "Wool type",
y = "Number of breaks",
title = "Breaks ~ wool type + tension level")
The default color palette is “cfs”. To use a different one, just call it by name:
ggplot(warpbreaks) +
geom_boxplot(aes(x = wool,
y = breaks,
color = wool,
fill = wool),
alpha = 0.5,
width = 0.5,
show.legend = FALSE) +
facet_wrap(~tension,
labeller = labeller(tension =
c("L" = "Low",
"M" = "Medium",
"H" = "High")
)) +
scale_color_fishpals("adultchinook", discrete = TRUE) +
scale_fill_fishpals("adultchinook", discrete = TRUE) +
labs(x = "Wool type",
y = "Number of breaks",
title = "Breaks ~ wool type + tension level")
This theme is designed to have good properties when knitting to pdf or to Microsoft Word. These properties include:
- Default size 11 font, with size 11 for axis titles and size 14 for chart titles.
- Default inner border around the plot margins and the inner panel
(
inner_border = TRUE). - Close-ish spacing of facets to fit on a vertical page.
- Default legend position of bottom, horizontal orientation.
ggplot(mpg) +
geom_point(aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
theme_report() +
labs(y = "Miles per gallon",
x = "Engine displacement (L)",
title = "Highway mpg ~ Engine displacement")
ggplot(economics_long, aes(x = date, y = value01)) +
geom_line(aes(color = variable),
size = 0.5) +
theme_report(inner_border = FALSE) +
scale_color_fishpals() +
guides(color = guide_legend(title = NULL)) +
labs(x = "Date",
y = "Value index",
title = "Scaled economic indices ~ year") 
ggplot(warpbreaks) +
geom_boxplot(aes(x = wool,
y = breaks,
color = wool,
fill = wool),
alpha = 0.5,
width = 0.5,
show.legend = FALSE) +
facet_wrap(~tension,
labeller = labeller(tension =
c("L" = "Low",
"M" = "Medium",
"H" = "High")
)) +
scale_color_fishpals(discrete = TRUE) +
scale_fill_fishpals(discrete = TRUE) +
theme_report() +
labs(x = "Wool type",
y = "Number of breaks",
title = "Breaks ~ wool type and tension level")
This theme is designed with good defaults for presentations. These include:
- Default size 14 font
- Default transparencies for plot.background element_rect()s, which will correspond to a dark theme when you save with ggsave(…, bg = “transparent”).
- Minimalist design for clean slides.
- Widely-spaced facet panels
ggplot(mpg) +
geom_point(aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
theme_pres() +
labs(y = "Miles per gallon",
x = "Engine displacement (L)",
title = "Highway mpg ~ Engine displacement")
ggplot(economics_long, aes(x = date, y = value01)) +
geom_line(aes(color = variable),
size = 0.5) +
theme_pres() +
scale_color_fishpals() +
guides(color = guide_legend(title = NULL)) +
labs(x = "Date",
y = "Value index",
title = "Scaled economic indices ~ year") 
ggplot(warpbreaks) +
geom_boxplot(aes(x = wool,
y = breaks,
color = wool,
fill = wool),
alpha = 0.5,
width = 0.25,
show.legend = FALSE) +
facet_wrap(~tension,
labeller = labeller(tension =
c("L" = "Low",
"M" = "Medium",
"H" = "High")
),
nrow = 1) +
scale_color_fishpals(discrete = TRUE) +
scale_fill_fishpals(discrete = TRUE) +
theme_pres() +
labs(x = "Wool type",
y = "Number of breaks",
title = "Breaks ~ wool type + tension level")
This theme has default font sizes and axis options that are often used in publications.
ggplot(economics_long, aes(x = date, y = value01)) +
geom_line(aes(color = variable),
size = 0.5) +
theme_pub() +
scale_color_brewer(palette = 6) + # using color brewer black and white palette for demonstration
guides(color = guide_legend(title = NULL)) +
labs(x = "Date",
y = "Value index",
title = "Scaled economic indices ~ year") 