Adding a Touch of glitr

Adding a Touch of glitr: Developing a Package of Themes on Top of ggplot
Aaron Chafetz & Karishma Srikanth
Posit Conf 2023 | Chicago

How do you create brand cohesion across your large team when it comes to data viz? My colleague and I, inspired by the BBC's bbplot, developed a package on top of ggplot2 to create a common look and feel for our team's products. This effort improved not just the cohesiveness of our work, but also trustworthiness. By creating this package, we reduced the reliance on using defaults and the time spent on each project customizing numerous graphic elements. More importantly, this package provided an easier on-ramp for new teammates to adopt R. We would like to share our journey within a federal agency developing a style guide, to guide and inspire other organizations who could benefit from developing their own branding package and guidance.

Links
glitr R package - https://github.com/USAID-OHA-SI/glitr
OHA Data Visualization Style Guide - https://issuu.com/achafetz/docs/oha_styleguide

Transcript

2. 2 This presentation was made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The contents in this presentation are the sole responsibility of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID, PEPFAR or the United States Government.
6. Office of HIV/AIDS
7. Taking a stroll down memory lane
8. +100 colors used in a single presentation
9. How do we create coherence and efficiency across all our work?
11. 55 countries USAID/PEPFAR is actively working in
12. Karishma Aaron
13. Karishma Aaron
15. Explore existing products universe Refinements to ggplot Packaging with a style guide
17. Understand existing workflows
18. Codify what exists from existing element
20. Repeating the same ggplot theme elements across the same file (and others) Repeating hex colors throughout that are not standard across files Repeating standard exports size and dpi for presentation usage
23. Explore existing products universe Refinements to ggplot Packaging with a style guide
24. Plot Elements Typeface Color
25. Declutter + Show the data
26. ggplot2::theme_minimal()
27. ggplot2::theme_minimal() %+replace% ggplot2::theme( plot.title = ggplot2::element_text( family = font_title, size = 14 * text_scale, face = "bold", color = color_title, margin = ggplot2::margin(b = half hjust = 0), plot.subtitle = ggplot2::element_te family = font_subtitle, ggplot2::theme_minimal()
28. Plot Elements Color Typeface
30. grDevices::windowsFonts( glitr_font_default = grDevices::windowsFont( "Source Sans Pro")) extrafont grDevices
31. p + si_style() Aa
32. Typeface Plot Elements Color
35. MEDIUM BLUE USAID RED USAID
36. Adobe Color Palettable Viz Palette MEDIUM BLUE USAID RED USAID
37. Adobe Color Palettable Viz Palette MEDIUM BLUE USAID RED USAID DENIM OLD ROSE OHA
39. Lisa Charlotte Muth blog.datawrapper.de/category/color-in-data-vis/
41. usaid-oha-si.github.io/glitr/
42. si_palettes si_rampr() si_style() scale_fill/color_si() si_preview() si_save()
43. si_palettes si_rampr() si_style() scale_fill/color_si() si_preview() si_save()
44. p + labs(subtitle = "default") BASE GGPLOT
45. p + labs(subtitle = "default") p + labs(subtitle = "glitr") + scale_fill_si() + si_style_ygrid() BASE GGPLOT GGPLOT + GLITR
46. “It just works”
47. Explore existing products universe Refinements to ggplot Packaging with a style guide
48. How to apply and socialize these elements?
49. 49 “PEPFAR has prioritized, and made significant progress toward, transitioning a substantial majority of our funding by agency to local partners”
50. 50 “PEPFAR has prioritized, and made significant progress toward, transitioning a substantial majority of our funding by agency to local partners”
51. 51 Sorted Colors Clutter Title Labels Axes Four operating units achieved USAIDʼs 70% goal Local partner share of budget 70% goal All of these operating units fell short of the 70% of goal. “PEPFAR has prioritized, and made significant progress toward, transitioning a substantial majority of our funding by agency to local partners”
53. 53 tinyurl.com/ohastyleguide
54. So what?
55. Before glitr and our Style Guide After glitr and our Style Guide
57. INVENTORY OF UNIVERSE REFINEMENTS IN GGPLOT PACKAGE AND SOCIALIZE
61. Links to Resources • Git/Github ◦ Happy with Git and GitHub for the useR (Bryan) ◦ USAID-OHA-SI Organizational GitHub • Plot Elements ◦ ggplot2 GitHub (Posit) ◦ glitr GitHub (Essam et al, USAID) • Color ◦ Adobe Color ◦ Viz Palette (Meeks and Lu) ◦ Color in Data Viz (Muth, Data Wrapper) • Package ◦ R Packages (Wickham and Bryan) ◦ Writing an R package from scratch (Westlake) ◦ Getting down with pkgdown (Richardson) ◦ Your first R package in 1 hour (Pileggi) • Style Guide ◦ OHA Data Visualization Style Guide (Chafetz and Essam) ◦ City Intelligence Data Design (Brondbjerg) ◦ Urban Institute Data Visualization Style Guide (Chartoff and Schwabish) ◦ Style Guide collection
62. Notes and Attribution • Prepared for Posit Conf 2023 in Chicago [September 19, 2023] ◦ Aaron Chafetz, Senior Economist, USAID/Office of HIV/AIDS ◦ Karishma Srikanth, Data Analyst, USAID/Office of HIV/AIDS ◦ Support and feedback from: Josh Davis, Tim Essam, Jessica Hoehner, Baboyma Kagniniwa, and Amanda Makulec • USAID Graphics Standards Manual and Partner Co-Branding (2020) • Lisa Charlotte Muth Datawrapper Blog • PEPFAR Annual Report to Congress (2022) • Aaron Chafetz and Tim Essam “Data Visualization Style Guide” Office of HIV/AIDS (2020) • Aaron Chafetz and Tim Essam “Visualizing Data: Using Data to Tell a Story” (2023) • Image sources ◦ “A man hand pointing or touching screen” indysystem [Adobe Stock] ◦ “Paint brushes nex to drawing book and water color palette” Tim Arerbury [Unsplash] ◦ “Person looking at painting” Antenna [Unsplash] ◦ Nike Logo [Wikipedia] ◦ “Person standing in front of trees” Andrew Neel [Unsplash] ◦ “White paint palette with paint brush” Glen Carrie [Unsplash] ◦ “A large grid of pins connected with string” ink drop [Adobe Stock] ◦ “person holding white dandelion flower” Ivan Dostal [Unsplash] ◦ “Painting by numbers with acrylics on cotton canvas is a hobby for practicing at home” Anna Huchak [Adobe Stock] ◦ “Echo” wandering echos [Unsplash] • Icon sourced from the Noun Project - Stairs by Setyo Ari Wibowo, hourglass by Mello, Laptop by Emmanuel Garcia Frias, Book by Abner Ignatius, Glasses by Nico Ilk