Quick start

The RColorBrewer package in R is an extension of the ggplot2 package, designed to simplify the process of combining multiple plots into a single layout.

The library provides a variety of color palettes that can be used to customize the appearance of your plots. The figure below showcases all the palettes available in the package.

✍️ author → Erich Neuwirth

📘 documentation → CRAN

all rcolorbrewer palettes

Installation

To get started with RColorBrewer, you can install it directly from CRAN using the install.packages function:

install.packages("RColorBrewer")

Basic usage

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)
colors = brewer.pal(n = 8, name = "PuOr")

# basic plot
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg, color = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  scale_color_manual(values = colors) +
  theme_minimal()

Key features

→ Get hex codes

Thanks to the brewer.pal() function, you can easily get the hex codes of a palette.

Example:

library(RColorBrewer)
brewer.pal(n = 8, name = "Spectral")

## [1] "#D53E4F" "#F46D43" "#FDAE61" "#FEE08B" "#E6F598" "#ABDDA4" "#66C2A5"
## [8] "#3288BD"

→ Display a palette

The display.brewer.pal() function allows you to visualize a palette.

Example:

library(RColorBrewer)
display.brewer.pal(n = 8, name = "Spectral")

→ Use in ggplot2

Since RColorBrewer is an extension of ggplot2, you can use it to customize the color of your plots.

Here are 3 examples that use 1 sequential palette, 1 diverging palette, and 1 qualitative palette:

library(RColorBrewer)
colors_seq = brewer.pal(n = 8, name = "Blues")
colors_div = brewer.pal(n = 8, name = "RdYlBu")
colors_qual = brewer.pal(n = 8, name = "Set3")

# basic plot
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg, color = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  scale_color_manual(values = colors_seq) +
  theme_minimal()

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg, color = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  scale_color_manual(values = colors_div) +
  theme_minimal()

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg, color = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  scale_color_manual(values = colors_qual) +
  theme_minimal()

Gallery of RColorBrewer examples

The gallery is filled with examples that showcase the versatility of the RColorBrewer package. Each example is designed to help you understand how to use custom colors in your plots.

Venn diagram

How to build a Venn diagram with custom colors