The goal of paletteer is to be a comprehensive collection of color palettes in R using a common interface. Think of it as the “caret of palettes”.

Notice This version is not backwards compatible with versions <= 0.2.1. Please refer to the end of the readme for breaking changes

You can install the released version of paletteer from CRAN with:

install.packages("paletteer")

If you want the development version instead then install directly from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("EmilHvitfeldt/paletteer")

The palettes are divided into 2 groups; discrete and continuous. For discrete palette you have the choice between the fixed width palettes and dynamic palettes. Most common of the two are the fixed width palettes which have a set amount of colors which doesn’t change when the number of colors requested vary like the following palettes:

on the other hand we have the dynamic palettes where the colors of the palette depend on the number of colors you need like the green.pal palette from the cartography package:

Lastly we have the continuous palettes which provides as many colors as you need for a smooth transition of color:

This package includes 2759 palettes from 75 different packages and information about these can be found in the following data.frames: palettes_c_names, palettes_d_names and palettes_dynamic_names. Additionally this github repo showcases all the palettes included in the package and more.

All the palettes can be accessed from the 3 functions paletteer_c(), paletteer_d() and paletteer_dynamic() using the by using the syntax packagename::palettename.

paletteer_c("scico::berlin", n = 10)
#> <colors>
#> #9EB0FFFF #5AA3DAFF #2D7597FF #194155FF #11181DFF #270C01FF #501802FF #8A3F2AFF #C37469FF #FFACACFF
paletteer_d("nord::frost")
#> <colors>
#> #8FBCBBFF #88C0D0FF #81A1C1FF #5E81ACFF
paletteer_dynamic("cartography::green.pal", 5)
#> <colors>
#> #B8D9A9FF #8DBC80FF #5D9D52FF #287A22FF #17692CFF

All of the functions now also support tab completion to easily access the hundreds of choices

Lastly the package also includes scales for ggplot2 using the same standard interface

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, color = Species)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_color_paletteer_d("nord::aurora")

A web application is available to quickly explore the available palettes.

In version <= 0.2.1 a palatte was selected by specifying a package and palette argument like so

paletteer_c(package = "nord", palette = "frost")

After version 0.2.1 palettes are selected using the syntax "packagename::palettename" inside the palette functions.

paletteer_c("nord::frost")

• Hadley Wickham For helpful code improvements.

paletteer includes palettes from the following packages: