Tidy Tuesday

Is a collection of my submissions to #TidyTuesday from Twitter. For more information about #TidyTuesday see their GitHub repo or see the latest postings on Twitter.

Packages

These are the packages I find very useful in developing my charts:

tidyverse - data manipulation and plotting
tidytuesday - importing the TidyTuesday data sets
glue - joining strings and more
scales - formatting axis and labels
showtext - importing and customizing fonts
ggtext - better text rendering
cowplot - combining plots and simply themes
waffle - making waffle plots

Look & Feel

Font

Two fonts families are predominately used: Lato and Merriweather. Lato is a san-serif font that is in the title and Merriweather is a serif font used in all other typography. Both are Google fonts. The textual chart components are sized based on their importance and to not distract from the data-encoding objects in the charts.

Alignment

The title, subtitle, legend, and caption (source and notes) are left aligned. Furthermore, all text should horizontal. For the y-axis' title, it should not be used and the axis will be descirbed in the subtitle.

My font style can be applied with:

library(showtext)
library(tidyverse)

font_add_google("Lato", "Lato")
font_add_google("Merriweather", "Merriweather")
showtext_auto()

# WIP
theme(
    text = element_text(family = "Merriweather", size = 12),
    plot.title = element_text(family = "Lato", size = rel(1.5)),
    plot.subtitle = element_text(size = rel(1.25)),
    axis.text = element_text(size = rel(0.875)),
    legend.text = element_text(size = rel(0.875)),
  )