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!