From alright to all ready to publish

Advanced dataviz talk for RGlasgow, exploring how we can visualise rainfall in Glasgow and Edinburgh

It was an absolute pleasure joining the RGlasgow group for an in-person talk on advanced dataviz. We talked about optimising…

• colour
• text
• theme
• annotations
• interactivity

all within R, using {ggplot} and a few other packages. Retrace our steps in the slides, and scroll down for additional resources.

Slides

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Resources

Colours

• Choosing colours for dataviz: Palatable Palettes, which includes links to further colour tools
• Checking your colour palette for accessibility: Chroma.js palette helper

Text & Annotations

• Colour contrast checker: colourcontrast.cc
• Font recommendations, and general typography fun: pimpmytype.com by Oliver Schöndorfer
• Getting fonts to work in R
• Additional font fun in R by June Choe
• Automating human-sounding sentences in R
• Ten tips for better text
• ggtext alignment cheatsheet

Theme

• DIY approach: Variations on a ggtheme, a lightening talk on five reasons why you should create your own bespoke theme and turn it into a function you can reuse throughout your project
• Dataviz Design System shortcut: Demo of the ophelia package, explaining the value in investing in a dataviz design system for your organisation

Interactivity

• David Gohel’s {ggiraph} is my favourite package for this. The documentation is pretty great!