Colours & Impact: Resources for Data Visualization with a splash of R

Jun 11, 2018

Ernest Omane-Kodie

4 minute read

via GIPHY

A curated list of awesome data visualization resources with a splash of R. Inspired by Awesome R.

Arranged in no particular order.

Colour theory & chart design

Subtleties of Color- Robert Simmon (2013)
Make grey your best friend - Andy Kirk (2015)
Viz Palette for Data Visualization Color - Elijah Meeks (2018)
How to Optimize Charts For Color Blind Readers - Tom Jager (2017)
The Do’s And Don’ts of Infographic Color Selection - Ryan McCready (2016)
10 Do’s and Don’ts of Infographic Chart Design - Midori Nediger (2018)
5 Data Visualization Tips to Guide Your Design Process - Jan Willem Tulp (2017)
What to consider when choosing colors for data visualization - Lisa Charlotte Rost (2018)
The Power of The Palette: Why Color is Key in Data Visualization and How to Use It - Alan Wilson (2017)

Web tools

colororacle - Colour-blindness simulator
Canva Color Palette Generator - creates a palette based on the five main colours of any uploaded image
Material palette - converts any two colours into a full colour palette
Colorgorical - tool by Connor Gramazio for creating categorical information visualization colour palettes
Colorbrewer - tool for choosing choropleth map color schemes, based on Cynthia Brewer’s research
Adobe Color CC - Adobe’s tool for creating categorical palettes
i want hue - tool by Mathieu Jacomy for optimising colours and palettes
colorfavs - tool to create and discover colours and Palettes

Podcasts

Data Stories - data visualization with Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner
policyviz - helping listeners better communicate their research, analysis, and ideas
The Present Beyond Measure - bi-weekly podcast at the intersection of analytics, data visualization, and digital analytics
storytelling with data - covers topics related to data storytelling, better presentations, and all things data visualization

Websites

Presentaion Zen - Garr Reynolds’s popular website on how to design and deliver powerful presentations
information is beautiful - David McCandless’s site dedicated to helping people make clearer, more informed decisions about the world
visual complexity - unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks
awwwards - a meeting point, where digital design professionals from across the globe find inspiration, impart knowledge and experience, connect, and share constructive, respectful critiques
Gapminder - Swedish independent foundation which fights misconceptions about global development and promotes a fact-based worldview
Chart porn - curates the cool data analysis work being done in the world

R packages

scico - Thomas Lin Pedersen’s R interface to Fabio Crameri’s colour palettes based on the Scientific Colour-Maps
RColorBrewer - Erich Neuwirth’s R implementation of Cynthia Brewer’s colobrewer
paletter - Andrea Cirillo’s package for creating an optimised palette from a custom image
viridis - Simon Garnier’s R Implementation of the Matplolib ‘viridis’ color map
ggThemeAssist - an RStudio add-in which provides a GUI for editing ggplot2 themes

You can search Github for more R packages using:

library(tidyverse)
# key word search with "palette", "theme" etc.
key_word = "palette"
gh_pkgs <- glue::glue("http://rpkg-api.gepuro.net/rpkg?q={key_word}") %>% 
  jsonlite::fromJSON()

You can search CRAN using:

cran_pkgs <- tools::CRAN_package_db()
cran_pkgs <- cran_pkgs[, !duplicated(colnames(cran_pkgs))]

cran_pkgs %>% 
  filter(str_detect(Description, "palette") == TRUE) %>% 
  select(Package, Date, Author, Title, Description)

Books

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward R.Tufte
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals - Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Good Charts The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations - Scott Berinato
The Truthful Art - Albert Cairo
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics - Nathan Yau
Information Graphics - Sandra Rendgen, Julius Wiedemann
Visual Thinking for Design - Colin Ware
Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps - Jacques Berti
Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline - Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton
R for Data Science - the graphics for communication chapter of Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham’s book