Simple tricks to improve your ggplot2 data visualisations
Welcome to the Simple tricks to improve your ggplot2 data visualisations workshop!
Contents
When creating visualisations with ggplot2 you probably want your charts to look both professional and aesthetically pleasing, as well as communicating your data effectively. The flexibility of ggplot2 means it’s possible to create highly customised charts. However, the ggplot2 ecosystem is huge (and ever-evolving) and it can be a bit overwhelming and time-consuming to figure out what code you actually need. Luckily, there are a few small tweaks you can make to your ggplot2 code to improve your charts.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Some lesser-known functions and arguments in
ggplot2that make it easier to create better visualisations - Extension packages that automate some of the trickier chart changes
- Examples of workflows to improve your process of creating charts in R
Target audience
The session aims to be fairly introductory, so you don’t need any previous experience of building R packages (or even writing functions!) but some basic knowledge of R will be useful. If you’re already a seasoned ggplot2 user, you’re also welcome to attend and hopefully you’ll still pick up a few tips!
Prerequisites
We’ll be using the following R packages which are pre-installed in your Posit Cloud environment:
- tidyverse
- ggtext (or marquee)
- ggview
- ggh4x
- countrycode