scales

This lesson is called scales, part of the R in 3 Months (Fall 2022) course. This lesson is called scales, part of the R in 3 Months (Fall 2022) course.

Transcript

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Solution

# Scales

## color

Take your scatterplot that you just made and add a scale using `scale_color_brewer`. Take a look at the help docs and choose a palette other than the default (hint: look at the `palette` argument). 

```{r}
ggplot(data = nhanes,
       mapping = aes(x = weight,
                     y = height,
                     color = phys_active)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2")
```

Do nearly the same thing to change the color of the last bar chart you made (the one about sleep and gender). 

```{r}
ggplot(data = sleep_by_gender, 
       mapping = aes(x = gender, 
                     y = avg_sleep,
                     fill = gender)) +
  geom_col() +
  scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Dark2") 
```

## x and y axes

Copy the graph you just made and change the y axis so it goes from 0 to 8.

```{r}
ggplot(data = sleep_by_gender, 
       mapping = aes(x = gender, 
                     y = avg_sleep,
                     fill = gender)) +
  geom_col() +
  scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
  scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0, 8))
```

Copy the last code chunk. Then adjust the breaks on the y axis so that it shows 0 to 8 by 1 (i.e. 0, 1, 2, etc).

```{r}
ggplot(data = sleep_by_gender, 
       mapping = aes(x = gender, 
                     y = avg_sleep,
                     fill = gender)) +
  geom_col() +
  scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
  scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0, 8),
                     breaks = c(0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8))
```

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

Learn More

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 Founder • 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 • April 12, 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

Lina Khan • October 6, 2021

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!

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")

Ellen Wilson • January 11, 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...