crthemes

crthemes provides a standardized theme to use for my thesis project figures. The goal is to write simple functions that can be applied to all plots to make it as straightforward as possible to create reproducible, consistent, beautiful visualizations.

The package comes bundled with a variety of color palettes name-matched to the species in my thesis project models and a selection of open source fonts.

Installation

You can install the development version of crthemes from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("christyray/crthemes")

Example

To apply the default theme to a plot, use theme_cr() in place of the normal theme() function:

library(crthemes)
library(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, color = as.factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.4) +
  labs(
    title = "My Custom Theme", 
    x = "Displacement (L)",
    y = "Highway MPG",
    color = "Cylinders"
  ) +
  theme_cr()

p

The scale_*_cr() functions apply colors from the custom palette to the plot. The palettes can be listed with pal_names() and previewed with pal_preview(). The palettes can be used with any plot, but they can also be name-matched to my model output:

df <- data.frame(
    x = factor(c("IL6R", "IL8R", "IL6R-Ab", "IL8R-Ab", "IL6R-Ab-IL8R"),
               levels = c("IL6R", "IL8R", "IL6R-Ab", 
                          "IL8R-Ab", "IL6R-Ab-IL8R")),
    y = c(0.45, 0.78, 0.61, 0.31, 0.72))
p <- ggplot(df, aes(x, y, fill = x)) +
  geom_col(show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_y_continuous(expand = expand1()) +
  scale_fill_cr(palette = "receptors", species = unique(df$x)) +
  labs(x = NULL, y = NULL) +
  theme_cr()
p

The geom_rangeframe_cr() function is a wrapper for geom_rangeframe from the ggthemes package. It allows for the limits of the range frame to be specified directly. The theme_rangeframe theme is the version of my standardized theme designed to be used with a range frame geom.

p <- ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, color = as.factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.4) +
  scale_color_cr() +
  labs(
    title = "My Custom Theme", 
    x = "Displacement (L)",
    y = "Highway MPG",
    color = "Cylinders"
  ) +
  geom_rangeframe_cr(xlim = c(1,7), ylim = c(10,50)) +
  coord_cartesian(clip = "off") +
  theme_rangeframe()
p

The crsave function saves the plots using sensible defaults for the type of plot to be saved. There are also helper functions for bar graphs and heat maps to better display the legends. More details on the packages functions are available in the package vignettes.