pjocolors: baby's first package 📦

The process

I was inspired to develop a colour palette package for a few reasons.

• I had just re-read the Lightning Thief ⚡.
  
• I’m a sucker for a pretty colour palette 🎨.
  
• It seemed like a simple place to start discovering the world of package development.
  
• I had recently become obsessed with a couple different colour palette packages (which I use constantly): fishualize and nationalparkcolors.

I have a lot of thanks and praise to give to these two packages. They’ve provided me with some beautiful palettes that I’ve used in various graphics and I’ve crawled through their code a few times over to help me understand how colour palette packages are set-up.

I still have a lot to learn about developing packages, but I have to say that this was a great little exercise! I’m so grateful that the devtools package exists, it made the whole process so painless.

Some great resources that I consulted to learn about the basics of writing packages were

• R package primer by Karl Broman
  
• Writing an R package from scratch by Hilary Parker
  
• Making Your First R Package by Fong Chun Chan
  
• R packages by Hadley Wickham (of course).

I highly recommend these resources if you’re looking to learn the basics of R packages too. All in all, I would say getting a handle of the basics (but just the basics) took me less than a day (thanks to these great writers).

These last couple weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time on #rstats twitter and reading other R blogger’s posts. My eyes have opened to R development and I’m definitely cultivating a rising interest in the topic. I’m already working on turning pjocolors into a real package that other people would want to use (and not just my little pet project). I’m excited to dive into it more as quarantine drags on and see what comes out of it 👩 🔧.

A bit about pjocolors

pjocolors v0.1.1 contains 6 colour palettes. Currently all palettes only contain 5 colours (however I hope to expand this in the future). The palette options can be accessed as follows:

library(pjocolors)
names(pjo_palettes)

## [1] "LightningThief"    "SeaOfMonsters"     "TitansCurse"      
## [4] "BatOfTheLabyrinth" "LastOlympian"      "LastOlympian2"

# Read in data (which I downloaded from the database)
pjo_checkouts <- read_csv('percyjacksoncheckouts.csv')

# Make plots
p1 <- 
  pjo_checkouts %>% 
  ggplot(aes(CheckoutYear, checkouts, color = MaterialType)) +
  geom_line(size = 1) +
  labs(x = 'Year', y = 'Number of checkouts') +
  guides(colour = guide_legend(""))

p2 <- 
  pjo_checkouts %>%
  ggplot(aes(reorder(MaterialType, -checkouts), checkouts)) +
  geom_col(aes(fill = MaterialType), show.legend = FALSE, 
           alpha = 0.8, width = 0.65) +
  labs(x = NULL, y = 'Number of checkouts')

# Apply pjocolors (default = LightningThief)
p1 + scale_color_pjo()

# Apply pjocolors (BatOfTheLabyrinth)
p2 + scale_fill_pjo(palette = 'BatOfTheLabyrinth')

p3 <- 
  pjo_checkouts %>%
  ggplot(aes(CheckoutMonth, checkouts, group = CheckoutMonth)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = checkouts), alpha = 0.65) +
  labs(x = NULL, y = 'Checkouts') +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = month.abb, breaks = 1:12) +
  guides(color = guide_colorbar(title = 'Number of checkouts'))

# Apply pjocolors (SeaOfMonsters)
p3 + scale_color_pjo(palette = 'SeaOfMonsters', discrete = FALSE)

# A palette for base graphics
pal <- pjo_palettes$TitansCurse

Future plans for pjocolors

The ideal is for this package to be a well-documented, general-use colour palette package. What this means to me right now is:

• Accessibility! I want to make sure I have some colourblind-safe options.
• Expanding the numbers of colours in some of the palettes.
  
• Expanding colour palette options (There’s more books to add!).
  
• Updating the colour palettes to make sure they adhere to general colour rules (aka they look as nice as possible).

Of course I’m open to any and all ideas on how this little package of mine could be improved, so feel free to tweet at me @MaiaPelletier if you have any ideas for me 🧠.