In CoryMcCartan/wacolors: Colorblind-Friendly Palettes from Washington State

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
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Colorblind-friendly Palettes from Washington State

The wacolor package contains r length(wacolors::wacolors) color palettes taken from the landscapes and cities of Washington state. Colors were extracted from a set of photographs, and then combined to form a set of continuous and discrete palettes. Continuous palettes were designed to be perceptually uniform, while discrete palettes were chosen to maximize contrast at several different levels of overall brightness and saturation. Each palette has been evaluated to ensure colors are distinguishable by colorblind people.

Discrete palettes contain at most seven colors. Don't create graphics that use more than seven discrete colors. You can color a map with four. Anything more risks confusion. Consider differentiating through faceting or labels, instead.

Installation

You can install the released version of wacolors from CRAN with:

install.packages("wacolors")

You can install the development version of wacolors from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("CoryMcCartan/wacolors")

Usage

It's easy to select a palette. Access palettes through wacolors$... for autocompletion suggestions.

library(wacolors)
library(ggplot2)

# See all palettes
names(wacolors)

# See one palette
wacolors$rainier

The package comes with ggplot2-compatible scales which are easy to use.

# access by name
ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) +
    geom_point(aes(color = factor(cyl), size=hp)) +
    scale_color_wa_d("rainier")

# or access using `wacolors$...`
ggplot(diamonds) +
    geom_bar(aes(x = cut, fill = clarity)) +
    scale_fill_wa_d(wacolors$sound_sunset, reverse=TRUE)

You can use the wa_pal function to directly construct a discretized/binned color scale.

image(volcano, col=wa_pal("ferries", 12))
image(volcano, col=wa_pal("vantage", 200, reverse=TRUE))

Code Generation

In case you do not wish to have wacolors as a dependency, you may use the pal_vector() and pal_functions() functions, which generate self-contained code for using the palettes. When using RStudio, this code will be loaded, ready to copy, at the console prompt.

pal_vector("sound_sunset", 15)

pal_functions("palouse")

The Palettes

Continuous Palettes

cont_pal = c("sound_sunset", "ferries", "forest_fire", "sea_star", "sea",
             "volcano", "baker", "diablo", "puget", "mountains", "gorge",
             "foothills", "footbridge", "olympic", "lopez", "vantage", "stuart")

for (pal in cont_pal) {
    plot(wa_pal(pal, 256))
}

Discrete Palettes

for (pal in setdiff(names(wacolors), cont_pal)) {
    plot(wa_pal(pal))
}

CoryMcCartan/wacolors documentation built on June 9, 2025, 10:49 p.m.