MN Color Palettes

Use the mncolors package to paint your data with colors from the MN state brand style guide, and a few color palettes inspired by local landscapes and animals, such as tree frogs and crayfish.

Use the palettes with ggplot2 or plot to give your charts some MN style.

Install

To install mncolors:

# First install the 'remotes' package
install.packages("remotes")

# Now you can install mncolors from github
remotes::install_github("tidy-MN/mncolors")

The Palettes

There are currently 13: primary, accent, extended, blue, green, gray, safety, primary_accent, primary_extended, primary_accent_extended, corn, treefrog, and caryfish.

More specifically:

mn_palettes

## $primary
##   MN Blue  MN Green 
## "#003865" "#78BE21" 
## 
## $accent
## [1] "#008EAA" "#0D5257" "#8D3F2B" "#5D295F" "#53565A"
## 
## $extended
## [1] "#A4BCC2" "#F5E1A4" "#9BCBEB" "#FFC845"
## 
## $blue
## [1] "#D9D9D6" "#A4BCC2" "#9BCBEB" "#008EAA" "#003865"
## 
## $green
## [1] "#D9D9D6" "#A4BCC2" "#0D5257" "#78BE21"
## 
## $gray
## [1] "#53565A" "#97999B" "#D9D9D6"
## 
## $safety
## [1] "#A6192E" "#E57200"
## 
## $primary_accent
##   MN Blue  MN Green                                                   
## "#003865" "#78BE21" "#008EAA" "#0D5257" "#8D3F2B" "#5D295F" "#53565A" 
## 
## $primary_extended
##   MN Blue  MN Green                                         
## "#003865" "#78BE21" "#A4BCC2" "#F5E1A4" "#9BCBEB" "#FFC845" 
## 
## $primary_accent_extended
##   MN Blue  MN Green                                                             
## "#003865" "#78BE21" "#008EAA" "#0D5257" "#8D3F2B" "#5D295F" "#53565A" "#A4BCC2" 
##                               
## "#F5E1A4" "#9BCBEB" "#FFC845" 
## 
## $corn
## [1] "#78BE21" "#FFC845"
## 
## $treefrog
## [1] "#53412B" "#474F27" "#96B02C" "#94AD81" "#BFC453"
## 
## $crayfish
## [1] "#832D12" "#34424A" "#6C5E2E" "#AB8237" "#5493AA"

Examples

In a ggplot use the MN palettes with the scale_fill_mn() and scale_color_mn() functions.

library(mncolors)
library(ggplot2)

# Primary
ggplot(data = mpg) +   
   geom_point(aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = class), size = 6, alpha = 0.7) +
   scale_color_mn(palette = "primary", reverse = TRUE)

# Extended
ggplot(data = mpg) +   
   geom_point(aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = class), size = 6, alpha = 0.7) +
   scale_color_mn(palette = "extended")

# Primary + Accent
ggplot(diamonds) + 
  geom_bar(aes(x = cut, fill = clarity)) +
  scale_fill_mn(palette = "primary_accent")

# Crayfish
ggplot(diamonds) + 
  geom_col(aes(y = mean(price), x = cut, fill = cut)) +
  scale_fill_mn(palette = "crayfish")

Alternatively, use mncolors() to feed a specific number of colors from a palette to a ggplot layer.

library(ggplot2)

df <- dplyr::starwars[1:5, ]

ggplot(df, aes(x = height, y = reorder(name, height), fill = height)) +
    geom_col() + 
    scale_fill_gradientn(colors = mncolors(5, palette = "primary")) +
    theme(legend.position = "none") +
    labs(title = "How tall are they?",
         subtitle = "Star Wars character heights",
         x = "height (cm)",
         y = "")

Lots of colors!

Enter any number you want to mncolors() to return a bucket of colors.

mncolors(10, "blue")

##  [1] "#D9D9D6FF" "#B0BEB9FF" "#A4BABDFF" "#A7C4D4FF" "#A5CCE8FF" "#89C4E5FF"
##  [7] "#4EAAC8FF" "#0084A0FF" "#005D7DFF" "#003865FF"

mncolors(100, "green")

Base plots

In this example we use the primary_accent palette directly via the colorRampPalette() function.

# Volcano example

## Create palette
pal <- colorRampPalette(mn_palettes$primary_accent)

## Use 50 colors from it
image(volcano, col = pal(50))