Color Palettes Inspired by Transformers Toys, Cartoons and Comics

Color palettes drawn from the Transformers franchise, centered on the 1984-1989 Generation 1 toys and extending to their Generation 2 re-releases, the cartoon animation models and the Marvel comics. Covers the leaders, every member and combined form of the combiner teams (Aerialbots, Protectobots, Technobots, Constructicons, Stunticons, Combaticons, Terrorcons, Predacons, Seacons, Pretender Monsters and Breastforce), the Dinobots, the Seeker jets, Soundwave and the cassettes, the Insecticons, the 1984 Autobot cars and Mini Vehicles and the 1986 movie cast, with separate palettes for the toy, the cartoon animation model, the Marvel comic coloring and the Generation 2 re-release where each exists. Includes 'ggplot2' color and fill scales for discrete and continuous data, team palettes that take one color from each member of a combiner team, metadata linking each palette to its character, faction, team and reference page, and helpers to shortlist palettes that suit categorical, color-blind-safe, sequential or diverging use. Hex values are approximations of the toys' plastic and paint colors; the package is a fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro or Takara Tomy.

transformerpalettes

Color palettes for R and ggplot2 drawn from the Transformers franchise, centered on the Generation 1 toys and extending to their Generation 2 re-releases, the cartoon animation models and the Marvel comics. It covers Optimus Prime, Megatron, every member and combined form of the combiner teams from the Aerialbots and Superion to the Seacons and Piranacon, and the rest of the 1984-1989 cast. Each character has a palette for the original toy, most have one for the cartoon, many have one for the comic, and the teams Hasbro recolored for Generation 2 have one for that, because the sources often disagree about what color a robot is. It works the same way as packages like wesanderson: pick a character by name, get a vector of hex colors, or drop a scale straight into a ggplot. Because the combiner teams are sets of five or six figures, each team also gives a ready-made categorical palette with one color per member.

transformerpalettes is a fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro or Takara Tomy. Hex values are approximations of the toys' plastic, chrome and paint colors; see "How the palettes were made" below.

Browse online

Every palette, with its colors, toy photo and Transformers Wiki link, is browsable and filterable at https://bmaitner.github.io/transformerpalettes/articles/browse.html. Each card has a Suggest a change link that opens a prefilled GitHub issue, and there is a form to request a character who is not covered yet. WISHLIST.md lists what is queued.

Installation

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("bmaitner/transformerpalettes")

Usage

library(transformerpalettes)

# what is covered
tf_media()
tf_factions()
tf_teams()
table(tf_characters$team, tf_characters$medium)

# palette names, optionally for one faction, team or role
tf_palette_names()
tf_palette_names(team = "Constructicons")
tf_palette_names(role = "combined form")

# the colors of one character (prints the swatches and the hex codes)
tf_palette("optimus_prime")
#> Transformers palette 'optimus_prime' (5 colors, toy)
#> Autobot: Optimus Prime
#> #D0202A #1F3E8F #B8BABF #F2D23C #2D2D2D

# first three colors, a 12-step gradient, or the same gradient dark-to-light
tf_palette("Megatron", 3)
tf_palette("devastator", 12, type = "continuous")
tf_palette("hot_spot", 12, type = "continuous", sort = TRUE)

# swatches with hex codes, for a team or faction at a time
tf_show_palettes(team = "Aerialbots")
tf_show_palettes(faction = "Decepticon", role = "combined form", ncol = 3)

Toy, cartoon or comic

Every function takes a medium argument that defaults to "toy", so the plain names always give the toy colors. Ask for "cartoon" to get the flat colors of the Sunbow animation model, "comic" for the Marvel coloring where one exists, or "g2" for the Generation 2 re-release of the three combiner teams Hasbro recolored in 1992-94. The full names with a suffix work too.

tf_palette("drag_strip")                      # yellow-orange and plum toy
tf_palette("drag_strip", medium = "cartoon")  # yellow and purple cartoon model
tf_palette("megatron_comic")                  # same as medium = "comic"

tf_palette_names(medium = "cartoon")
tf_palette_names(role = "leader", medium = "all")
tf_show_palettes(c("optimus_prime", "optimus_prime_cartoon", "optimus_prime_comic"), ncol = 1)
tf_team_palette("Constructicons", medium = "cartoon")   # lime green, not grass green
tf_team_palette("Combaticons", medium = "g2")           # 1994 camouflage colors

Every character has a cartoon palette; the Seacons' comes from the Japanese Super-God Masterforce series, since they never appeared in the Sunbow show. Comic palettes exist for the two leaders and all nine core combiner teams, each sampled from a named Marvel US or UK story that the browser links to. Marvel coloring changed from issue to issue (and Marvel UK recolored the same art), so treat them as one issue's reading rather than a canon. The Pretender Monsters have no cartoon palette because they never appeared in one; WISHLIST.md lists what is still open. Asking for a medium a character does not have yet gives an error that says so.

Team palettes

tf_team_palette() takes one color from each member of a combiner team, in the team's order (torso first, then limbs), and names each color after the member it came from. The body colors are faithful but collapse for teams cast from shared plastics, so distinct = TRUE picks, for each member, the color from its palette that is furthest from the colors chosen so far.

tf_team_palette("Stunticons")
#> Transformers team palette 'stunticons' (5 colors)
#> motormaster = #1E1E1E
#> dead_end = #7A1F2E
#> breakdown = #F0F0EC
#> drag_strip = #F2C21E
#> wildrider = #4E5257

tf_team_palette("Constructicons")                  # six shades of green
tf_team_palette("Constructicons", distinct = TRUE) # green, purple, silver, ...

ggplot2

scale_colour_tf() and scale_fill_tf() build a discrete scale by default, or a continuous gradient with discrete = FALSE. The explicit _d and _c variants and the American scale_color_* spellings are also exported. sort = TRUE on a continuous scale orders the palette from darkest to lightest first. Team palettes go through scale_colour_manual().

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = drv)) +
  geom_point(size = 2.5) +
  scale_colour_tf("optimus_prime")

ggplot(diamonds, aes(cut, fill = cut)) +
  geom_bar() +
  scale_fill_tf("predaking")

ggplot(faithfuld, aes(waiting, eruptions, fill = density)) +
  geom_raster() +
  scale_fill_tf_c("hot_spot", sort = TRUE)

ggplot(economics_long, aes(date, value01, colour = variable)) +
  geom_line() +
  scale_colour_manual(values = unname(tf_team_palette("Combaticons")))

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = drv)) +
  geom_point(size = 2.5) +
  scale_colour_tf("optimus_prime", medium = "cartoon")

Set reverse = TRUE to flip a palette. If a discrete variable has more levels than a palette has colors, the palette is interpolated so every level still gets a color, at some cost to legibility.

Finding a palette that works for a plot

Toy colors were chosen to look good on a shelf, not on a chart. tf_find_palettes() shortlists the palettes whose colors hold up for a given job, judged from the colors themselves:

tf_find_palettes("categorical")   # every pair of colors clearly distinct
tf_find_palettes("colorblind")    # still distinct under simulated CVD
tf_find_palettes("sequential")    # one hue, wide lightness range
tf_find_palettes("diverging")     # two hues with a light color between

# restrict to a faction or team, or see the shortlist as swatches
tf_find_palettes("colorblind", faction = "Autobot")
tf_show_palettes(use = "colorblind", ncol = 3)

The judgments come from tf_palette_stats(), which reports the smallest pairwise distance between colors in CIE Lab, the same after simulating deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia, the lightness range, and the hue spread. The thresholds are simple heuristics, so treat the result as a shortlist to look at rather than a guarantee.

Picking the best few colors from one or more palettes

Whole palettes are faithful to the characters, not to the chart. tf_pick() pools the colors of the palettes you name, drops any that would not read against the background (white for "light" and "greyscale", near-black for "dark", judged by WCAG contrast), and then chooses the n colors whose closest pair is farthest apart in CIE Lab. With colorblind = TRUE the distance is the worst case across simulated deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia; with style = "greyscale" only lightness counts, so the result survives a black-and-white printer.

# five colors for a white-background plot, from the two leaders
tf_pick(c("optimus_prime", "megatron"), n = 5)
#> Transformers pick of 5 colors from optimus_prime + megatron
#> light background #FFFFFF, min distance 21.7
#> optimus_prime = #D0202A
#> optimus_prime = #1F3E8F
#> megatron = #8C9095
#> megatron = #2A2A2A
#> megatron = #6B3FA0

# four color-blind-safe colors for a dark theme, from a whole team
tf_pick(tf_palette_names(team = "Combaticons"), n = 4,
        style = "dark", colorblind = TRUE)

# printable in grayscale, using the cartoon colors
tf_pick(tf_palette_names(team = "Stunticons"), n = 4,
        style = "greyscale", medium = "cartoon")

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = drv)) +
  geom_point(size = 2.5) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = unname(tf_pick(c("optimus_prime", "megatron"), 3)))

Each color is named after the palette it came from, and the min_distance attribute reports how separable the closest pair is (above 20 is comfortable, below about 12 is risky). The contrast filter is strict on purpose: saturated yellows fail it against white, so a light-mode pick from the Predacons has fewer colors to work with. Lower min_contrast to keep them, or pass a different background.

Crediting the sources

The colors belong to the toys, cartoons and comics they came from, so give them a line. tf_credit() writes that line from the palette metadata, grouped by medium, and follows a tf_pick() or tf_team_palette() result back to every character that contributed. The caption form is one sentence; the acknowledgment form adds that the hex values are approximations that imply no endorsement, which is the wording journals tend to want. Cite the package itself with citation("transformerpalettes").

tf_credit("optimus_prime")
#> [1] "Colors: Optimus Prime toy colorway by Hasbro and Takara Tomy, via the transformerpalettes R package."

tf_credit(tf_team_palette("Stunticons"))
#> [1] "Colors: Motormaster, Dead End, Breakdown, Drag Strip and Wildrider toy colorways by Hasbro and Takara Tomy, via the transformerpalettes R package."

tf_credit(c("optimus_prime", "megatron_cartoon"))
#> [1] "Colors: Optimus Prime toy colorway by Hasbro and Takara Tomy and Megatron cartoon colors from the Generation 1 animated series, via the transformerpalettes R package."

tf_credit("optimus_prime", format = "acknowledgment")
#> [1] "Figure colors are derived from the Optimus Prime toy colorway designed by Hasbro and Takara Tomy. Hex values are approximations from the transformerpalettes R package (Maitner 2026) and imply no endorsement by Hasbro or Takara Tomy."

# straight into a figure caption
cols <- tf_pick(c("optimus_prime", "megatron"), n = 3)
ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point(size = 2.5) +
  scale_color_manual(values = unname(cols)) +
  labs(caption = tf_credit(cols))

format = "markdown" links each character to its Transformers Wiki page, for Quarto and R Markdown captions, and package = FALSE drops the package mention when it is cited elsewhere.

Character background

tf_characters is a data frame with one row per palette: the character, which medium the palette records, faction, combiner team and combined form, its role in the team, alternate mode, the year of the toy or first appearance, a description of the colors, and links to the character's page and the reference image (toy photo, episode still or comic panel) on the Transformers Wiki.

t(tf_characters[tf_characters$palette == "drag_strip", ])
#> palette     "drag_strip"
#> base        "drag_strip"
#> medium      "toy"
#> character   "Drag Strip"
#> faction     "Decepticon"
#> team        "Stunticons"
#> combiner    "menasor"
#> role        "combiner limb"
#> alt_mode    "Tyrrell P34 six-wheeled race car"
#> year        "1986"
#> n_colours   "5"
#> description "Yellow-orange race car plastic with dark plum head and blaster, ..."
#> source      "https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Drag_Strip_(G1)"
#> image       "https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/images2/c/c2/G1Dragstrip_toy.jpg"

Coverage

Palette names are the character's name in snake_case (hun_gurrr, blast_off); tf_palette() also accepts "Hun-Gurrr" and "Blast Off". Every team is drawn in man/figures/palettes-<team>.png (spaces in a team name become hyphens). Characters and teams that are lined up to be added next are listed in WISHLIST.md; add a line there, or open a request.

How the palettes were made

There is no published set of hex values for Transformers toys, so these are approximations built by hand:

1. Each character was matched to its original Hasbro release on the Transformers Wiki, and to the wiki's photo of that toy in robot mode. The page and the photo are the source and image columns of tf_characters.
2. The plastic, chrome, die-cast and paint colors of that toy were listed from the photo and the wiki's own description of the release, and a hex value chosen for each by eye. Colors are ordered body plastic first, then secondary plastic, then accents, so the first few colors in each palette are the most distinct.
3. Members of one combiner team share plastics, so their palettes share hex values on purpose. The combined form's palette takes one color from each contributing part.

Cartoon palettes were read the same way from an episode still on the wiki, which the browser links to; they use the flat colors of the animation model, so a cartoon palette is typically brighter and simpler than its toy. Comic palettes name the Marvel issue they were taken from.

Palettes range from four to six colors. Chrome and die-cast parts do not reduce to a single flat color; a silver or gray stands in for them. Wiki photos vary in lighting, so expect some palettes to be rough, and the least certain ones are flagged in WISHLIST.md. Corrections are welcome, ideally with a photograph of the toy under neutral light. Use the palette browser to open a prefilled issue for a specific palette, or pick a form from the issue templates. tf_show_palettes() prints the hex codes under each swatch to make reporting easy.

Trademarks

Transformers, Autobot, Decepticon and the character names used here are trademarks of Hasbro and Takara Tomy. This package only records approximate color values and uses the names to refer to them.