Themes

We’ll focus more on the use of the ggplot2 package and a little dplyr for data manipulation. 3 Three additional packages will be also be used.

library(tidyverse)
library(scales)
library(ggrepel)
library(patchwork)

Finally, you can customize the non-data elements of your plot with a theme:

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = class)) +
  geom_smooth(se = FALSE) +
  theme_bw()

ggplot2 includes the eight themes shown in Figure 12.2, with theme_gray() as the default.2 Many more are included in add-on packages like ggthemes (https://jrnold.github.io/ggthemes), by Jeffrey Arnold. You can also create your own themes, if you are trying to match a particular corporate or journal style.

It’s also possible to control individual components of each theme, like the size and color of the font used for the y axis. We’ve already seen that legend.position controls where the legend is drawn. There are many other aspects of the legend that can be customized with theme(). For example, in the plot below we change the direction of the legend as well as put a black border around it. Note that customization of the legend box and plot title elements of the theme are done with element_*() functions. These functions specify the styling of non-data components, e.g., the title text is bolded in the face argument of element_text() and the legend border color is defined in the color argument of element_rect(). The theme elements that control the position of the title and the caption are plot.title.position and plot.caption.position, respectively. In the following plot these are set to “plot” to indicate these elements are aligned to the entire plot area, instead of the plot panel (the default). A few other helpful theme() components are used to change the placement for format of the title and caption text.

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(
    title = "Larger engine sizes tend to have lower fuel economy",
    caption = "Source: https://fueleconomy.gov."
  ) +
  theme(
    legend.position = c(0.6, 0.7),
    legend.direction = "horizontal",
    legend.box.background = element_rect(color = "black"),
    plot.title = element_text(face = "bold"),
    plot.title.position = "plot",
    plot.caption.position = "plot",
    plot.caption = element_text(hjust = 0)
  )

For an overview of all theme() components, see help with ?theme. The ggplot2 book is also a great place to go for the full details on theming.