Level Up Your Plots: Using colour, annotations, text hiearchy and other tricks to make your data story stand out

NHS-R 2023 Conference | Online code-along workshop

In this 3-hour workshop, we explored design tips and their implementation using #rstats for creating stand-out plots with memorable stories.

The main topics we explored were: - Choosing intuitive colour palettes to make it easier to remember what is what - Making the most of text by adding text hierarchy to carefully chosen text - Reducing eye movement and cognitive load by placing annotations carefully - Highlighting key patterns to help readers interpret the plots

The code we used is shared within the slides - feel free to reuse as much of it as you like!

List of resources

Packages

• tidyverse
• palmerpenguins
• systemfonts
• monochromeR
• ggtext
• geomtextpath
• colorblindr (installation instructions: github.com/clauswilke/colorblind)

Additional resources

• Creating and checking palettes from anchor colours: www.vis4.net/palettes
• Checking text-to-background contrast: colourcontrast.cc
• Testing a palette with graphs: projects.susielu.com/viz-palette
• Applying a colourblindness simulator to any image: daltonlens.org/colorblindness-simulator
• Picking fonts: pimpmytype.com/font-matrix/
• Debugging fonts: yjunechoe.github.io/posts/2021-06-24-setting-up-and-debugging-custom-fonts/
• Building R packages: Shannon Pileggi - Your first R package in 1 hour

Recording

Coming soon!

Slides

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Thompson, Cara. 2023. “Level Up Your Plots: Using Colour, Annotations, Text Hiearchy and Other Tricks to Make Your Data Story Stand Out.” October 3, 2023. https://www.cararthompson.com/talks/nhsr2023-level-up-workshop.