Creating a color gradient in R with ggplot2 (CC151)

October 4, 2021 • PD Schloss • 1 min read • •

The ggplot2 R package offers a lot of flexibility in representing color using discrete or continuous values as a gradient. In this episode of Code Club, Pat will use scale_color_manual, scale_color_gradient, and scale_color_gradient2 to customize the change in attitudes around receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The data depict the percentage of people in 15 countries who would be willing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as of August and October of 2020.

Pat uses the scale_color_manual, scale_color_gradient, and scale_color_gradient2 functions from ggplot2 and a variety of functions from the dplyr, showtext, and ggtext packages in RStudio. Nearly all of the concepts Pat talks about for color can also be used with fills using scale_fill_manual, scale_fill_gradient, and scale_fill_gradient2.

Code

You can browse the state of the repository at the

• beginning of the episode
• end of the episode

Data

The august_october_2020.csv data is available in the GitHub repository.

X.1,Total Agree - August 2020,Total Agree - October 2020
Total,77,73
India,87,87
China,97,85
South Korea,84,83
Brazil,88,81
Australia,88,79
United Kingdom,85,79
Mexico,75,78
Canada,76,76
Germany,67,69
Japan,75,69
South Africa,64,68
Italy,67,65
Spain,72,64
United States,67,64
France,59,54