Themes
Readings
- Chapter 22 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization1
- Naomi Robbins, “Are Grid Lines Useful or Chartjunk?”
- Stephen Few, “Grid Lines in Graphs are Rarely Useful”
- Henry Wang, “ggplot2 Theme Elements Demonstration”
- Glance through the documentation for ggplot’s complete themes and
theme(), especially the examples near the bottom
Questions to reflect on
- How do the principles of CRAP apply to graph design and other theme elements?
- Should plots use gridlines? Naomi Robbins says yes; Stephen Few says no—what do you say?
Slides
The slides for today’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
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.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:
Claus E. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media, 2018), https://serialmentor.com/dataviz/.↩︎