PNW Color Palette Package for R

I am soon moving away from the most beautiful place I will ever live, so I did what any nostalgic nature kid / data science nerd would do and immortalized it in an R color palette package. Now I (and you!) can have the colors of Washington State and the Pacific Northwest live on in our presentation figures forever.

All photos were taken by me in places that I love. The Pantone Studio iPhone app helped me extract colors, and Chroma.js Color Palette Helper helped me adjust values to ensure that all palettes are color-blind safe to be used for attractive and inclusive data viz. Structure of the code was inspired by the wesanderson and LaCroixColoR packages from GitHub. See more examples on twitter.

Install Package

install.packages("devtools") 
devtools::install_github("jakelawlor/PNWColors")

Usage

library(PNWColors)

names(pnw_palettes)
 [1] "Starfish" "Shuksan"  "Bay"      "Winter"   "Lake"     "Sunset"   "Shuksan2" 
 [8] "Cascades" "Sailboat" "Moth" "Spring"   "Mushroom" "Sunset2"  "Anemone"

Palettes

Low Tide – San Juan Islands, Washington

Mount Shuksan from Mount Baker Ski Resort – North Cascades, Washington

View from a sunset kayak – Bellingham Bay, Washington

Washington Park snowday – Anacortes, Washington

Whistle Lake, the best place in the world – Anacortes, Washington

Washington Park sunset – Anacortes, Washington

Mount Shuksan, golden hour – North Cascades, Washington

Watson Lake Trail End – North Cascades, Washington

Moth – Vendovi Island, Washington

Funky Dory Sailboat – Anacortes, Washington

Oyster Dome Sunset – Chuckanut, Washington

Cherry Blossoms – Anacortes, Washington

Anchor Cove – Anacortes, Washington

Mushroom Hunting – Orcas Island, Washington

Building Palettes

Use the pnw_palette() function to build and view palettes. Inputs are ‘name’, ‘n’, and ‘type’ (continuous or discrete). ‘Name’ is required. If ‘n’ is blank, function will assume n is equal to the number of colors in the palette (5-8), but if n > palette length, it will automatically interpolate colors between. If ‘type’ is missing, the function will assume “discrete” if n < palette length, and “continuous” if n > palette length.

pnw_palette(name="Starfish",n=7,type="discrete")

pnw_palette("Winter",100)

pnw_palette("Bay",8,type="continuous")

pnw_palette("Moth",12)

Example Plots

Palettes can be easily integrated into Base R imaging or ggplot2.

pal <- pnw_palette("Shuksan",100)
image(volcano, col = pal)

pal=pnw_palette("Lake",5, type = "discrete")
ggplot(diamonds, aes(carat, fill = cut)) +
  geom_density(position = "stack") +
  scale_fill_manual(values=pal)  +
  theme_classic()

pal=pnw_palette("Shuksan2",100)
ggplot(data.frame(x = rnorm(1e4), y = rnorm(1e4)), aes(x = x, y = y)) +
  geom_hex() +
  coord_fixed() +
  scale_fill_gradientn(colours = pal) +
  theme_classic()
  
  # Or, to switch the order, use rev(), see below
  scale_fill_gradientn(colours = rev(pal))

ggplot(data = iris,aes(x=Petal.Length,y=Petal.Width,color=Species))+
  geom_point(size=2)+
  scale_color_manual(values=pnw_palette("Spring",3))+
  theme_classic()

pal <- pnw_palette("Anemone",3)
ToothGrowth$dose <- as.factor(ToothGrowth$dose)
ggplot(ToothGrowth, aes(x=dose, y=len, fill=dose)) + 
 geom_violin(trim=FALSE)+
 geom_boxplot(width=0.1, fill="white")+
 labs(title="Plot of length  by dose",x="Dose (mg)", y = "Length")+
 scale_fill_manual(values=pal)+
 theme_classic()

library(tidyverse)
library(urbnmapr)
pal <- pnw_palette("Winter",100)
countydata %>%
 left_join(counties, by = "county_fips") %>%
 filter(state_name =="Washington") %>%
 ggplot(mapping=aes(long,lat,group = group, fill = horate)) +
 geom_polygon(color="black",size=.25) +
 scale_fill_gradientn(colours = pal) +
 coord_map(projection="albers",lat0=39,lat1=45) +
 theme(legend.title = element_text(),
       legend.key.width = unit(.5,"in")) +
 labs(fill="Homeownership rate") +
 theme_void()

Contact

Used the palettes in your paper and care to share? (please do!)
Love the palettes and want to share?
Reach me at jake.lawlor@mail.mcgill.ca or @Jake_Lawlor1