Ready-to-use ggplot2 theme

This is a ggplot2 theme I use for almost all my plots. You can use it and adapt it if you want. It's designed to be truly plug-and-play. See below for examples.

As with any software project, this has a collection of dependencies it builds on:

• The trafford data lab theme was one of the main inspirations.
• It uses Mozilla's Fira Sans font because it is beautiful.
• Fonts in R graphics are notoriously difficult. The package extrafont solves this.
• Of course, one of the main dependencies is ggplot2.
• I used coolors to generate the colours.

Installation

On mac computers, first install the Fira Sans font to the font book.

remotes::install_github("vankesteren/firatheme")

The preferred way to save plots is via the firaSave() function. For png output, this works out of the box.

PDF output

For pdf output, firaSave() embeds the Fira Sans font by default using the extrafont package. The requirement for this is ghostscript:

On windows

1. Install ghostscript.
2. Restart your R or RStudio application
3. Now you can output!

On mac

1. (install homebrew)
2. brew install ghostscript
3. Restart your R or RStudio application
4. Now you can output!

On linux

1. Install ghostscript so that it is on the PATH.
2. Restart your R or RStudio application
3. Now you can output!

Example plots

Below you can find some example plots made using theme_fira()

Dots and lines

library(ggplot2)
library(firatheme)

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = mpg*0.43, y = wt*0.4535924, colour = factor(cyl))) +
       geom_point(size = 2) + geom_smooth(se = FALSE) +
       labs(title = "Car weight vs efficiency",
            x = "Efficiency (km/l)",
            y = "Weight (1000 kg)",
            colour = "Cylinders") +
       theme_fira() +
       scale_colour_fira()

firaSave("plot.png", device = "png")

Bar graph

library(ggplot2)
library(firatheme)

ggplot(chickwts, aes(x = feed, y = weight)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", width=0.8, fill = firaCols[1]) +
  labs(title = "Chicken weights by feed type",
       y = "Weight (grams)",
       x = "") +
  theme_fira()

Boxplot

library(ggplot2)
library(firatheme)

ggplot(iris, aes(y = Sepal.Length, x = Species, fill = Species)) +
  geom_boxplot(col = firaCols[4], width = 0.5, size = 1) +
  labs(y = "Sepal Length", title = "Iris data") +
  theme_fira() +
  scale_fill_fira() +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

More lines

library(ggplot2)
library(firatheme)

ggplot(airquality, aes(y = Ozone, x = 1:nrow(airquality))) +
  geom_line(colour = firaCols[2], size = 0.7) +
  geom_point(colour = firaCols[2], size = 1.7) +
  geom_smooth(colour = firaCols[1], size = 0.7, se = FALSE) +
  labs(title = "Ozone in New York", x = "Days") +
  theme_fira()

Colours

The colour palette of firatheme is available through firaCols and firaPalette(). In ggplot objects, you should use scale_fill_fira() and scale_colour_fira() for mapped variables. Optionally, the argument continuous = TRUE can be passed.

Using the palette functions, you can get any number of colours from the palette, for example firaPalette(n = 25) --- the last image in the figure below:

Citation

If you want to cite firatheme, you can use the following bibtex:

@article{vankesteren2021firatheme, 
  title = {vankesteren/firatheme: firatheme version 0.2.4}, 
  DOI = {10.5281/zenodo.4679413}, 
  publisher = {Zenodo}, 
  author = {Erik-Jan van Kesteren}, 
  year = {2021}, 
  month = {apr}
}