NHS-R/NHS.pycom Conference Workshop 2023: Level Up Your Plots!
Level up your plots: Using colour, annotations, text hierarchy and other tricks to make your data story stand out with Cara Thompson
Wednesday 04th October 2023
Workshop Content:
You are encouraged to bring a ggplot of your own making to the workshop – we will code our way towards a better version of it together. Copy the code from the Quarto slides and reuse at will!
Here’s a list of the packages I’ll be using:
Available on CRAN:
Tidyverse
Palmerpenguins
Systemfonts
monochromeR
ggtext
geomtextpath.
Available from GitHub:
colorblindr
See instructions at: github.com/clauswilke/colorblindr
And here’s what we’ll cover:
Picking intuitive colours to make our graphs more memorable
Making our colour choices (and text) as accessible as we can
With a review of the latest Nightingale In Print Accessibility guidelines
Optimising text hierarchy in our plots, and packing our work up as a reusable ggplot theme
Reducing unnecessary eye movement and cognitive load by being careful about what text we include/exclude, and where we put it
Adding in-plot annotations to highlight important patterns.
By the end of the session, you’ll have…
A solid set of colours that you’ve tested against accessibility criteria
A reusable ggplot theme with optimised text hierarchy
A decluttered plot that makes the most of the visual space available
Additional tips and tricks for adding in-plot annotations
A set of resources you can return to when working on new graphs!