Comprehensive Collection of Color Palettes

The choices of color palettes in R can be quite overwhelming with palettes spread over many packages with many different API's. This packages aims to collect all color palettes across the R ecosystem under the same package with a streamlined API.

The goal of paletteer is to be a comprehensive collection of color palettes in R using a common interface. Think of it as the “caret of palettes”.

Installation

You can install the released version of paletteer from CRAN with:

install.packages("paletteer")

If you want the development version instead then install directly from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("EmilHvitfeldt/paletteer")

Palettes

The palettes are divided into 2 groups; discrete and continuous. For discrete palette you have the choice between the fixed width palettes and dynamic palettes. Most common of the two are the fixed width palettes which have a set amount of colors which doesn’t change when the number of colors requested vary like the following palettes:

on the other hand we have the dynamic palettes where the colors of the palette depend on the number of colors you need like the green.pal palette from the cartography package:

Lastly we have the continuous palettes which provides as many colors as you need for a smooth transition of color:

This package includes 1085 from 31 different packages and information about these can be found in the following data.frames: palettes_c_names, palettes_d_names and palettes_dynamic_names. Additionally this github repo showcases all the palettes included in the package and more.

Examples

All the palettes can be accessed from the 3 functions paletteer_c(), paletteer_d() and paletteer_dynamic() using the package and palette arguments.

paletteer_c(package = "scico", palette = "berlin", n = 10)
#>  [1] "#9EB0FF" "#5AA3DA" "#2D7597" "#194155" "#11181D" "#270C01" "#501802"
#>  [8] "#8A3F2A" "#C37469" "#FFACAC"
paletteer_d("nord", "frost")
#> [1] "#8FBCBB" "#88C0D0" "#81A1C1" "#5E81AC"
paletteer_dynamic("cartography", "green.pal", 5)
#> [1] "#B8D9A9" "#8DBC80" "#5D9D52" "#287A22" "#17692C"

All of the functions also support symbol argument such that you don’t have to put your names in quotes

paletteer_c(scico, berlin, 10)
#>  [1] "#9EB0FF" "#5AA3DA" "#2D7597" "#194155" "#11181D" "#270C01" "#501802"
#>  [8] "#8A3F2A" "#C37469" "#FFACAC"
paletteer_d(nord, frost)
#> [1] "#8FBCBB" "#88C0D0" "#81A1C1" "#5E81AC"
paletteer_dynamic(cartography, green.pal, 5)
#> [1] "#B8D9A9" "#8DBC80" "#5D9D52" "#287A22" "#17692C"

ggplot2 scales

Lastly the package also includes scales for ggplot2 using the same standard interface

library(ggplot2)
 
ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, color = Species)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_color_paletteer_d(nord, aurora)

Special thanks

• Hadley Wickham For helpful code improvements.

Included packages

paletteer includes palettes from the following packages:

• awtools github
• cartography github CRAN
• dichromat CRAN
• dutchmasters github
• gameofthrones github CRAN
• ggsci github CRAN
• ggpomological github
• ggthemes github CRAN
• ghibli github CRAN
• grDevices CRAN
• harrypotter github CRAN
• jcolors github CRAN
• LaCroixColoR github
• NineteenEightyR github
• nord github CRAN
• oompaBase CRAN
• ochRe github
• palettetown github CRAN
• palr github CRAN
• pals github CRAN
• Polychrome CRAN
• quickpalette github
• rcartocolor github CRAN
• RColorBrewer CRAN
• Redmonder CRAN
• RSkittleBrewer github
• scico github CRAN
• tidyquant github CRAN
• viridis github CRAN
• visibly github CRAN
• wesanderson github CRAN
• yarrr github CRAN