Style Time Series Plots Like the Wall Street Journal

Easily override the default visual choices in 'ggplot2' to make your time series plots look more like the Wall Street Journal. Specific theme design choices include omitting x-axis grid lines and displaying sparse light grey y-axis grid lines. Additionally, this allows to label the y-axis scales with your units only displayed on the top-most number, while also removing the bottom most number (unless specifically overridden). The goal is visual simplicity, because who has time to waste looking at a cluttered graph?

WSJ Plot

Make ggplot graphs that look like the Wall Street Journal.

Quick Use

Install from CRAN

Coming soon...

Install from GitHub

 > devtools::install_github("slee981/wsjplot")

Make plot

 > library(ggplot2)
 > library(dplyr)
 > `%>%` <- magrittr::`%>%`

 > economics_long %>%
       filter(variable %in% c("psavert", "uempmed")) %>%
       ggplot(aes(date, value, color = variable)) +
       geom_line() +
       scale_y_continuous(
           labels = label_wsj(suffix = " M")
       ) +
       scale_color_discrete(
           labels = c("Series 1", "Series 2")
       ) +
       theme_wsj() +
       labs(
           title = "Some Economics Plot",
           caption = "Source: Top secret.",
           y = ""
       )

Functions

• theme_wsj(): Sets the default theme. Use as you would any ggplot2::theme_choice().
• label_wsj(): Formats y-axis ticks such that the top number on the graph has the units, and the rest of the numbers are left visually clean. This also removes the bottom most axis label by default, although this can be overridden. Use in place of any scales::label_choice().

Contribute

1. From your terminal:

$ git clone https://github.com/slee981/wsjplot.git
$ cd wsjplot 

1. In RStudio:

 > library(devtools)
 > load_all()              # load exported functions into memory 
 > test()                  # run tests
 > document()              # update based on roxygen2 doc strings
 > check()                 # full diagnostic tests