ggthemes

ggthemes adds themes, scales and geoms to ggplot2 that reproduce the look of well-known publications and software, and of the graphics advocated by Edward Tufte and Stephen Few:

• Themes after The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Google Docs, Highcharts, Apple Numbers, Stata, Solarized, base R graphics and more.
• Color, shape and linetype scales and palettes to match, including colorblind-safe and Tableau palettes. See the palette gallery.
• Geoms for Tufte’s range frames and minimal box plots, and tools for banking to 45° to choose a plot’s aspect ratio.

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("ggthemes")

Or the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("jrnold/ggthemes")

Themes

Every theme is shown below with its matching color scale, where it has one. Each figure links to the theme’s reference page.

library("ggplot2")
library("ggthemes")

mtcars2 <- within(mtcars, {
  vs <- factor(vs, labels = c("V-shaped", "Straight"))
  am <- factor(am, labels = c("Automatic", "Manual"))
  cyl  <- factor(cyl)
  gear <- factor(gear)
})

p1 <- ggplot(mtcars2) +
  geom_point(aes(x = wt, y = mpg, colour = gear)) +
  labs(
    title = "Fuel economy falls with weight",
    x = "Weight (1000 lbs)",
    y = "Fuel economy (mpg)",
    colour = "Gears"
  )

# `theme_map()` intentionally removes axes, so use geographic data rather than
# a scatterplot. `theme_solid()` is likewise intended to leave only geoms.
us_states <- map_data("state")
p_map <- ggplot(us_states, aes(long, lat, group = group)) +
  geom_polygon(aes(fill = region), colour = "white", linewidth = 0.15) +
  coord_map("albers", lat0 = 39, lat1 = 45) +
  guides(fill = "none")

p_solid <- ggplot(mtcars2) +
  geom_point(aes(x = wt, y = mpg, colour = gear), size = 3) +
  guides(colour = "none")

p1 + theme_base() +
  scale_colour_colourblind()

p1 + theme_calc() +
  scale_colour_calc()

p1 + theme_clean() +
  scale_colour_tableau()

p1 + theme_economist() +
  scale_colour_economist()

p1 + theme_excel() +
  scale_colour_excel()

p1 + theme_excel_new() +
  scale_colour_excel_new()

p1 + theme_few() +
  scale_colour_few()

p1 + theme_fivethirtyeight() +
  scale_colour_fivethirtyeight()

p1 + theme_foundation() +
  scale_colour_colourblind()

p1 + theme_gdocs() +
  scale_colour_gdocs()

p1 + theme_hc() +
  scale_colour_hc()

p1 + theme_igray()

p_map +
  theme_map()

p1 + theme_numbers() +
  scale_colour_numbers()

p1 + theme_pander() +
  scale_colour_pander()

p1 + theme_par() +
  scale_colour_colourblind()

p1 + theme_solarized() +
  scale_colour_solarized()

p1 + theme_solarized_2() +
  scale_colour_solarized()

p_solid +
  theme_solid(fill = "#202124") +
  scale_colour_tableau()

p1 + theme_stata() +
  scale_colour_stata()

p1 + theme_tufte() +
  scale_colour_few()

p1 + theme_wsj(base_size = 8) +
  scale_colour_wsj()

Color palettes

A sample of the color palettes is shown below. The palette gallery shows every palette in the package.

Geoms

geom_rangeframe() draws Tufte’s range frame, axis lines that span only the range of the data. geom_tufteboxplot() draws his minimal box plot.

ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_rangeframe() +
  coord_cartesian(clip = "off") +
  labs(x = "Weight (1000 lbs)", y = "Miles per gallon") +
  theme_tufte()

ggplot(mtcars, aes(factor(cyl), mpg)) +
  geom_tufteboxplot() +
  labs(x = "Cylinders", y = "Miles per gallon") +
  theme_tufte()

Learn more

• The reference pages document every theme, scale, palette and geom, with examples.
• The palette gallery shows every color palette.
• For a tutorial that uses ggthemes, see the add-on packages section of Rafael Irizarry’s Introduction to Data Science.