Generate a large color palette with Colorgorical

2018-07-23

#R, #Tutorials

Sometimes we need a lot of colors to represent all the categories in our data. We can use the httr and jsonlite packages to retrieve a list of colors from the Colorgorical website by Connor Gramazio.

Let’s use the web API to retrieve a color palette:

# install.packages(c("httr", "jsonlite"))

colorgorical <- function(n = 10) {
  # Create a JSON data string that we'll send to the server.
  post_body <- jsonlite::toJSON(
    auto_unbox = TRUE,
    list(
      'paletteSize' = n,
      'weights' = list(
        'ciede2000' = 0,
        'nameDifference' = 0,
        'nameUniqueness' = 0,
        'pairPreference' = 0
      ),
      'hueFilters' = list(),
      'lightnessRange' = c("25", "85"),
      'startPalette' = list()
    )
  )
  # Send a POST request to the server with our data.
  retval <- httr::POST(
    url = 'http://vrl.cs.brown.edu/color/makePalette',
    body = post_body
  )
  # Get the response from the server.
  retval <- httr::content(retval)
  # Convert LAB values to hexadecimal strings.
  lab2hex <- function(Lab) rgb(convertColor(Lab, from = "Lab", to = "sRGB"))
  return(sapply(retval$palette, function(x) {
    lab2hex(unlist(x[1:3]))
  }))
}

pal <- colorgorical(21)

d <- data.frame(x = rep(1:7, 3), y = rep(1:3, each = 7), color = pal)

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(d, aes(x, y, fill = color)) +
  geom_tile(color = "white", size = 2) +
  geom_text(
    mapping = aes(label = color),
    color = "white", size = 8, fontface = "bold", family = "Courier"
  ) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

You should also try http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/