Color palette list (For humans)
Making color palettes can be hard, so here is a comprehensible list of them (All available in R)
Blogposts and other resources
Here is a collection of material on the use and creation of color
palettes in r.
- Creating corporate colour palettes for
ggplot2 - Make your own color palettes with
paletti - How to create a color palette in R with more than 15 colors with
ggplot2 - Generating a Custom Color Palette Function in
R - How to build a color palette from any image with R and k-means
algo - Why choice of colour is important beyond aesthetic considerations
and how the quality of a palette might be
assessed - Viz palette: colors in
action
Color manipulation packages
- Extract palettes from images and
text - Fast Vectorised Colour Conversion and
Comparison - How to Read, Inspect, and Manipulate Color Swatch
Files - Simple colour manipulation in
R
Generative packages
The purpose of this project is to showcase the palettes already
available in R (packages). However sometimes you have to resort to make
one yourself. When that is the case the following packages aides in
creating.
- AndreaCirilloAC/paletter
- jolars/qualpalr
- ronammar/randomcoloR
- johnbaums/hues
- ColorPalette
- oaColors
- earthtones
- leeper/colourlovers
When creating color palettes certain website have also provided valuable
Perception of color palettes
Selecting a color palette requires a number of different considerations.
Within these considerations is
- the palette retains its integrity when printed in black and white
- people with colorblindness are able to understand it
In the following I have outlined a couple of those problems
Printing in black and white
While most of the palettes presented here contains a wide variety of
colors. While that is compelling, you need to remember that your product
might be printed in black and white one day, and you should pick a
palette that allows for interpretation if that is the case.
First example is the rainbow palette from the grDevices package with
its colorful display. However as we see here would it be horrible if
used for black and white printing since different colors are mapped to
the same shade of grey.
A related problem happens with the standard color palette used in
ggplot2 since that color is picked to have constant chroma and
luminance thus yielding the same shade of grey when desaturated. (This
palette is no longer the default for continuous variables in ggplot2
after version 3.0.0)
One of the continuous palette that satisfy this criteria is the well
known viridis palettes.
To test if the palette you want to use will be distorted when in black
and white, use the colorspace::desaturate() to desaturate it.
Color blindness
Another thing you have to take into consideration when picking a palette
is how it would be viewed by a person who is color
blind. To visualize the
effect of color blindness on our palettes we will turn to two packages.
The dichromat package can simulate color blindness on individual color
and then also entire palettes like so in this rainbow palette:
Another package that can provide helpful is the amazing colorblindr package that is able to simulate color blindness to ggplot objects them self.
Honorable mentions
Due to the somehow vague notion of “color palette” have I decided to
exclude certain kinds of packages from the main gallery. Generative package have been discussed earlier.
cpt-city
The amazing cpt-city is a wonderful project of creating an archive of color palettes to be used
in cartography, technical illustration and design. Due to the immense
size (7140) I have decided to refer to it instead of re-illustration
them in this repository. If any of the palettes found here are for your
liking they can be accessed in R using the following package:
sport colors
Many of the palettes in sports related palettes have a very limited
number of colors (often only 2 colors). This leads to quite low
usability outside of the special area of sports analytic.
-
colorr
Color palettes for EPL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL teams. -
beanumber/teamcolors An R
package providing color palettes for pro sports teams.
Canva palettes
The ggthemes package include the 150 four-color palettes from the
canva.com. Due to the size and limited number of colors in
the palettes these palettes will be featured on their own page and only
once.
Palettes sorted by Package (alphabetically)
the jcolors continuous palettes are currently not available in the
paletteer package.
ALL PACKAGES CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://github.com/EmilHvitfeldt/r-color-palettes
