This package provides 9 discrete color palettes developed by Paul Tol at https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/ for qualitative, diverging, and sequential data. Colors within each palette are designed to match well together and be readable by all audiences, including color-blind readers.
disco can be installed directly from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("nsgrantham/disco")The disco API is similar to other color palette packages like viridis and scico.
View all 9 color palettes with disco_palettes_show()
library(disco)
disco_palette_show()
The following table summarizes the 9 color palettes. For more information, consult Paul Tol's Notes https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/.
| Palette | n | Data type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| bright | 7 | Qualitative | Good for lines and their labels. |
| vibrant | 7 | Qualitative | Built around the signature orange #FF7043 of the data visualization framework TensorBoard. |
| muted | 10 | Qualitative | Good for lines and maps. |
| light | 9 | Qualitative | Good for filled cells and backgrounds because it keeps black text readable. |
| sunset | 11 | Diverging | This is related to the ColorBrewer RdYlBu scheme, but with darker central colours and made more symmetric. |
| daybreak | 9 | Diverging | This is the reversed ColorBrewer RdBu scheme. |
| midnight | 9 | Diverging | This is the ColorBrewer PRGn scheme, with green #A6DBA0 shifted to #ACD39E to make it print-friendly. |
| eclipse | 9 | Sequential | This is the ColorBrewer YlOrBr scheme, with orange #FE9929 shifted to #FB9A29 to make it print-friendly. |
| rainbow | 23 | Sequential | This should not be used on a continuous scale, but on a discrete scale it offers up to 23 colors and remains relatively color-blind safe. |
Select a palette by name:
disco(palette = "sunset")
#> [1] "#364B9A" "#4A7BB7" "#6EA6CD" "#98CAE1" "#C2E4EF" "#EAECCC" "#FEDA8B"
#> [8] "#FDB366" "#F67E4B" "#DD3D2D" "#A50026"Scales are provided for ggplot2:
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(gapminder)
ggplot(filter(gapminder, year == 2007), aes(gdpPercap, lifeExp, size = pop, color = continent)) +
geom_point() +
scale_color_disco(palette = "vibrant")
Happy plotting!
https://www.colorbrewer2.org by Cynthia A. Brewer, Geography, Pennsylvania State University https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/ by Paul Tol, Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON)