colourgen

Install

Install using devtools::install_github("cjtexas/colourgen")

The colourgen package provides a single, simple interface for generating colour palettes in R. colourgen::make_palette is the main function and returns a colourgen object with very handy plot and print methods to make generating, inspecting and fine-tuning color palettes a breeze.

The colour parameter will accept any base R color function, RColorBrewer named palette, viridis named palette, color-hex palette ID or variable-length character vector of any combination of base grDevices::colours and/or hexadecimal colors.

At the time I created this package there weren’t enough good diverging palettes and I tend to use them alot in my work, so colourgen will default to some right out-of-the box.

colourgen::make_palette()

## Empty or Unknown Colour(s)... 
##   Defaulting to Tableau-style 
##   Orange-Blue Diverging Palette

my_palette <- colourgen::make_palette(default = FALSE)
## Empty or Unknown Colour(s)... 
##   Defaulting to Stephen Few-style 
##   Earth-Emerald Diverging Palette
plot(my_palette)

If you like tweaking your color palettes, you can easily do that. Let’s just simply replace the middle color with “ivory” and call colourgen::make_palette again to check the new results.

my_palette[4] <- "ivory"
my_palette_mod <- colourgen::make_palette(colour = my_palette)
plot(my_palette_mod)

No Limitations

If you want to interpolate a palette that normally has a hard limit; don’t worry, colourgen was created for this very reason and wil return as many colors as you need for your factor levels! NOTE:, you should still be careful and use common sense ;)

colourgen::make_palette(colour = "set1", n = 15)

color-hex API

colourgen also supports the color-hex palette API. Just supply a valid paletteID and you can interpolate over that palette ’til your heart’s content.

colourgen::make_palette(colour = 1010612, n = 7)

Image Sampling

colourgen will also accept an image path or url. For example, let’s make a palette from the R logo!

colourgen::make_palette(colour = "http://r-project.org/Rlogo.png", n = 7)

Other Options

colourgen will let you shuffle or reverse the returned palette if you need to.

colourgen::make_palette(colour = "set3", n = 9, shuffle = TRUE)

colourgen::make_palette(colour = "Purples", n = 15, reverse = TRUE)

Summary

colourgen aims to be a simple, but effective solution to the common task of crafting and previewing color palettes from many diverse sources. I hope you find it useful and also feel free to make pull/merge requests for bugs and improvements or adding new features if you like.