R Color Brewer’s palettes


The RColorBrewer package offers several color palette for R. This post displays all of them to help you pick the right one.

Color Section About line chart

The RColorBrewer package is an unavoidable tool to manage colors with R. It offers several color palettes, as you can see in the attached figure. This page just allows to visualize the composition of each palette. Other pages explain how to use this tool.

There are 3 types of palettes :

  • Sequential palettes are suited to ordered data that progress from low to high. Lightness steps dominate the look of these schemes, with light colors for low data values to dark colors for high data values.

  • Diverging palettes put equal emphasis on mid-range critical values and extremes at both ends of the data range. The critical class or break in the middle of the legend is emphasized with light colors and low and high extremes are emphasized with dark colors that have contrasting hues.

  • Qualitative palettes do not imply magnitude differences between legend classes, and hues are used to create the primary visual differences between classes. Qualitative schemes are best suited to representing nominal or categorical data. 



library(RColorBrewer)
par(mar=c(3,4,2,2))
display.brewer.all()

Related chart types
Ggplot2
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Interactivity
3D
Caveats
Data art



Contact

This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message on Twitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

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