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Complete the scales sections of the data-visualization-exercises.Rmd file.

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scales Resources

Want to see all the built-in colors you can use? Here's a cheatsheet.

There is information on the tidyverse website about the various scales (scale_color_brewer, scale_color_viridirs_d, scale_y_continuous, etc.).

Chapter 8 of Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction

There are a lot of other packages that give you color/fill palettes you can work with. See especially the paleteer package, which is a meta palette package, give you access to palettes from many other packages.

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

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David Keyes

David Keyes

April 5, 2021

Yup! Check out the seq() function. For example, this:

breaks = seq(from = 0, to = 8, by = 1))``` Does the same thing as: ```scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0, 8), breaks = c(0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8))```

Jeff Shandling

Jeff Shandling

April 11, 2021

Hi David-

I'm a bit confused on where to find the distinct colors for each palette. For example, where did you find "Dark2"? Thanks Jeff

David Keyes

David Keyes

April 12, 2021

If you run the help for the scale_fill_brewer() you'll see the various options. To see what they look like, this page has a visual display.

Jeff Shandling

Jeff Shandling

April 12, 2021

Thanks for the help

For the change of colors (or fill) using scale_color_brewer, I typed palette.pals() to see the options available. It shows the option used in the solutions ("Dark2") as "Dark 2" with a space inside, which I when I ran didn't work. But Dark2 worked. I also tried "Okabe-Ito" as shown in the palette.pals() list, but that didn't work either. Anyway, why would the options show with the spacing (or whatever else?) not correct? Also, when would we need to worry about adding 'd' (like scale_color_veridis_d, as shown in the lesson), vs not? Thanks!

David Keyes

David Keyes

October 6, 2021

Good questions!

On the palettes question, the available palettes for the scale_fill_brewer() function can be found in the help file for that function.

    The following palettes are available for use with these scales:
    
    Diverging
  BrBG, PiYG, PRGn, PuOr, RdBu, RdGy, RdYlBu, RdYlGn, Spectral
  
  Qualitative
  Accent, Dark2, Paired, Pastel1, Pastel2, Set1, Set2, Set3
  
  Sequential
  Blues, BuGn, BuPu, GnBu, Greens, Greys, Oranges, OrRd, PuBu, PuBuGn, PuRd, Purples, RdPu, Reds, YlGn, YlGnBu, YlOrBr, YlOrRd  

I've never used the palette.pals() function so I'm not entirely sure how you'd use what's returned there.

Juan Clavijo

Juan Clavijo

October 18, 2021

Hi! I'm typing this code in to change the color of the bar graph but the color is not changing from the standard colors. However, when I copy and paste your code from the solutions (which looks the same at least to me) it does work. Why might that happen?

ggplot(data = sleep_by_gender, mapping = aes(x = gender, y = avg_sleep, fill = gender)) + geom_col() + scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2")

David Keyes

David Keyes

October 18, 2021

The reason why you're having trouble is that you're using the fill aesthetic property, but scale_color_brewer(). Try scale_fill_brewer() instead and it should work!

Tatiana Bustos

Tatiana Bustos

July 28, 2022

Ah! I was having this error too. Changing to scale_fill makes sense.

Ellen Wilson

Ellen Wilson

January 10, 2023

The pre-set palettes are very cool! I'm wondering, though, how to use an organization's brand colors? How can that be set up? The ideal would be if there was a way to get sequential, qualitative, and diverging palette options based on brand colors...

David Keyes

David Keyes

January 10, 2023

Check out this blog post on how we do just this in our consulting work!

Ellen Wilson

Ellen Wilson

January 20, 2023

Thanks! That is great, but I admit that it looks pretty overwhelming to me, as a novice coder. I'm still debating about Excel vs. R, and this is one thing that Excel does so easily, it is discouraging to see it so complicated in R!

David Keyes

David Keyes

January 20, 2023

I empathize with you: this is something that is quite a bit harder in R than in Excel. However, I do think that if you do it once, it becomes easier (because you then can easily reuse your code).