Themes

Content for Monday, June 23, 2025–Friday, June 27, 2025

Readings

Required readings

Foundational principles:

• Chapter 22 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)

How to improve your labels:

• Andrew Heiss, “Quick and easy ways to deal with long labels in ggplot2”

Readings you should glance through and use as resources

theme() stuff:

• Clara Granell, “ggplot2 Theme System Cheatsheet”
• Henry Wang, “ggplot2 Theme Elements Demonstration”
• Glance through the documentation for ggplot’s complete themes and theme(), especially the examples near the bottom

Slides

The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Tip

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• CRAP and ggplot
• The anatomy of a ggplot theme

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

References

Wilke, Claus E. 2018. Fundamentals of Data Visualization. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media. https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/.