HGUTheme

HGUTheme has three main classes of functions:

• Functions to return the HEX code of the colours used in the unit logos
• Functions to create palettes interpolating the colours used in the unit logos
• Functions to scale ggplot2 plot colour and fill aesthetics to use interpolated colour palettes from the unit logos

These are explained below with examples.

Returning Colour HEX Codes

The most basic functions return the colour HEX codes. This can be seen here

ukri_light_blue()
#> [1] "#00BAD2"

This is useful to set colours for various aspects of plots or visualisations

barplot(
  3:1,
  col = ukri_light_blue()
)

As well as returning individual colours, palettes based on the logo can also be returned that will contain every colour in the logo

ukri_blues()
#> [1] "#2D2E5F" "#3A88A9" "#00BAD2"

This can be used to create plots such as this

barplot(
  3:1,
  col = ukri_blues()
)

Interpolating Colour Palettes

The UKRI blues palette only has three colours in it, however, what if you want to use more colours in your plot? You can also interpolate colours based on the theme, so say you want to use 5 colours from the UKRI blues you can use

ukri_blues_n(5)
#> [1] "#2C2D5F" "#375983" "#3987A9" "#2CA0BD" "#00B9D2"

This can be used in plots like the following

barplot(
  5:1,
  col = ukri_blues_n(5)
)

Automatically Colour ggplot2 Plots

ggplot2 is a popular plotting library from the tidyverse. It is used to create high quality visualisations. An example of a basic ggplot2 plot is given below

plot_data <- tibble(
  x = LETTERS[1:5],
  y = 5:1
)

plot_data %>%
  ggplot() +
  aes(x = x, y = y, fill = x) +
  geom_col() + theme_classic() +
  guides(fill = "none") + 
  labs(x = "Group", y = "Value")

The plots made by ggplot2 are created in layers. Another layer can be added from HGUTheme to recolour this plot with unit logo colour themes.

plot_data %>%
  ggplot() +
  aes(x = x, y = y, fill = x) +
  geom_col() + theme_classic() +
  guides(fill = "none") + 
  labs(x = "Group", y = "Value") +
  scale_fill_ukri_d()

There are layers for changing the colour and the fill aesthetics of your plot. These functions end in either a c or a d indicating whether you are using a continuous or a discrete scale.

For continuous scales, v0.1.0 of HGUTheme will only automatically interpolate between the colours of the logo, as shown here with this CRUK logo colour theme.

tibble(
  x = runif(1500),
  y = runif(1500)
) %>%
  filter(
    (x - 0.5)^2 + (y - 0.5)^2 < 0.25
  ) %>%
  mutate(
    col = (x - 0.5)^2 + (y - 0.5)^2
  ) %>%
  ggplot() +
  aes(x = x, y = y, colour = col) +
  geom_point() + theme_classic() +
  guides(colour = "none") + coord_equal() +
  scale_colour_cruk_c()

It is important to note, that these layers do not have to be used and the HEX code functions can be used to supply arguments to pre existing ggplot2 layers for similar effects, for example if the user wanted to recreate the above plot but without the dark blue, this can be acheived via

tibble(
  x = runif(1500),
  y = runif(1500)
) %>%
  filter(
    (x - 0.5)^2 + (y - 0.5)^2 < 0.25
  ) %>%
  mutate(
    col = (x - 0.5)^2 + (y - 0.5)^2
  ) %>%
  ggplot() +
  aes(x = x, y = y, colour = col) +
  geom_point() + theme_classic() +
  guides(colour = "none") + coord_equal() +
  scale_colour_gradient(
    low = cruk_light_blue(),
    high = cruk_pink()
  )