vpstheme

This package is in development.

Version 2.0.0 includes useable palettes and themes for the Department of Health and the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing as well as a range of helper functions, these palettes and themes require refinement.

Version 2.0.0 also includes scale_*_dh() functions that enable the use of the Department of Health’s palette for fills and colours in ggplot() objects.

In its current form, the package is useable and provides example code to enable others to extend theme_vps_foundation() and adapt scale_*_dh() for other departments.

The main purpose of vpstheme is to enable R users in the Victorian Public Service to use the colours and fonts defined in the Brand Victoria Guidelines to create compliant visualisations in ggplot.

Installation

You can install the development version of vpstheme from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("zerogetsamgow/vpstheme")

Brand Victoria

At the core of vpstheme are elements of Brand Victoria, including colours, palettes and fonts.

Brand Victoria colours

The Brand Victoria colour palette consists of ten primary colours, shown below.

Incorporating the primary colour palette, the Brand Victoria secondary colour palette is designed to accommodate the great range of applications across all sectors of the brand.

The palette has been categorised in 10 colour groups, from navy to pink, but the colours do not have to be used in these sets.

The included colours and their names, as per this package, are shown below.

Note, names used in this package have been selected by the package author. Brand Victoria colours don’t have names as such.

Each colour can be referenced directly using the {bv.*} format or via the palette object, eg bv_colours$primary[1] as shown below.

bv.navy
#> <palettes_colour[1]>
#> • #201547

bv_colours$primary[2]
#> <palettes_colour[1]>
#> • #00B2A9

bv.pink
#> <palettes_colour[1]>
#> • #C63663

bv_colours$secondary2[4]
#> <palettes_colour[1]>
#> • #007B4B

VIC font

VIC is the brand font to be used across all communications. The .otf files for VIC font are saved in this package, but are not currently available for use.

In place of VIC font, vpstheme uses Rubik which is loaded on attachment using the systemfonts package.

Departmental themes and colours

Colour palettes

vpstheme utilises the Brand Victoria colours defined in the package to create Departmental palettes. Currently, the package includes palettes for:

• Department of Health - dh_colours is based on the departments standard templates, with a primary and secondary colour for each template and tints for each primary colour.

scales::show_col(unlist(dh_colours), ncol = 4)

• Department of Families, Fairness and Housing - dffh_colours is based on the departments standard templates, with a primary and secondary colour for each template and tints for each primary colour.

scales::show_col(unlist(dffh_colours[1:3]), ncol = 4)

scales::show_col(unlist(dffh_colours[4:7]), ncol = 4)

Themes

vpstheme is designed to enable R users in the VPS to produce ggplot2 products that comply with departmental style guides simply.

To enable this, vpstheme exports departmental themes that use the naming convention theme_vps_*(), where * denotes the department.

As well as utilising departmental colours these themes are rendered using the Rubik font.

Currently, the package includes themes for:

• Department of Health - theme_vps_dh().

library(ggplot2)
# Create plot with theme, scales and labs, then coord_flip()
ggplot(
  data = airport_flights, 
  aes(
    x = reorder(city, flights), 
    y = flights)) +
  geom_col(aes(fill = city)) +
 
  geom_text(
    aes(label = flights/1e6,
        y = 2e6),
    colour = bv.smoke,
    hjust = 1, size = 5) +
  coord_flip() +
  # Use scale_fill_manual to highlight Milan
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("Milan"=bv.pink), guide = "none") +
  scale_x_discrete(name = NULL) +
  scale_y_continuvps(
    name = "Flights per year, millions", 
    labels = scales::label_number(scale = 1/1e6),  
    limits = c(0,50e6)) +
  labs(title="Flights at major international airports")+
  theme_vps_dh()

• Department of Families, Fairness and Housing - theme_vps_dffh().

ggplot(
  data = line_data, 
  aes(
    x = year, 
    y = trips,
    fill = Region,
    colour = Region,
    )
  ) +
  # Add line chart
  geom_line() +
   # Add labels using geom_text
  geom_text(
    data = line_data |> 
      # Filter data to only add labels for max(year)
      dplyr::filter(year == max(year)),
    aes(label = Region), 
    size = 5,
    # Shift to right of x value.
    hjust = -.1) +
  # Use scale_x_continuvps to easily add space for label.
  scale_x_continuvps(name = NULL, expand_left = .05, expand_right = .2) +
  scale_y_continuvps(name = "Number of Trips", limits = c(0,500)) +
  scale_colour_dffh_line(name = NULL, guide = "none") +
  theme_vps_dffh()

The themes at present largely only differ in the background colours that can be specified.

• the base_colour parameter of theme_vps_dh can take values pink, orange, red and blue that correspond to the department’s primary colours.

• the base_colour parameter of theme_vps_dffh can take values teal, mint, blue and purple that correspond to the department’s core colours.

For example:

ggplot(
  data = airport_flights, 
  aes(
    x = reorder(city, flights), 
    y = flights)) +
  geom_col(aes(fill = city)) +
  geom_text(
    aes(label = flights/1e6,
        colour = city,
        y = 2e6),
    hjust = 1, size = 5) +
  coord_flip() +
  # Use scale_fill_manual to highlight Milan
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("Milan"=bv.charcoal), guide = "none", na.value = bv.smoke) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = c("Milan" = bv.smoke), guide = "none", na.value = bv.charcoal) +
  scale_x_discrete(name = NULL) +
  scale_y_continuvps(
    name = "Flights per year, millions", 
    labels = scales::label_number(scale = 1/1e6),  
    limits = c(0,50e6)) +
  labs(title="Flights at major international airports")+
  theme_vps_dh("pink")

theme_foundation

Each theme is built on theme_vps_foundation.

This theme is designed to be a foundation from which to build new themes, and not meant to be used directly. theme_vps_foundation() is a complete theme with only minimal number of elements defined. It is easier to create new themes by extending this one rather than theme_gray() or theme_bw() from ggplot2, because those themes define elements deep in the hierarchy.

This theme takes {[ggthemes]{theme_foundation}()} and sets base text family and size to Rubik and 15 as well as setting margins and other parameters to match departmental guidelines.

Scales

Fill and colour

vpstheme includes two functions that enable the use of dh_colours as fills and colours in ggplot() objects. These functions allow the user to easily use the palettes from dh_colours and both operate as wrappers around scale_*_manual().

scale_colour_dh() is used in the example above. The code for scale_*_dh() provides examples for others who wish to create similar functions for other departments.

scale_colour_dh_line() and scale_colour_dffh_line() provide departmental style guide compliant colours for line charts. Refer to the vignette for more information.

Continous axes scales

vpstheme includes two functions - scale_y_continuvps() and scale_x_continuvps() - that enable you to easily use default expansion values for continuous scales in ggplot() objects that allow. These functions allow the user to easily use the palettes from dh_colours and both operate as wrappers around scale_*_manual().

Functions

vpstheme includes a small number of useful functions. These include:

• clean_vic_lga() based on the clean_state function from the strayr package this function cleans Victorian local government names into consistent formats to help with formatting and joining data.

• make_tints allows you to simply create Brand Victoria compliant tint colour palettes ranging from a specified start colour to white or black in five linear increments. White/black are then excluded from the palette to leave you with four lighter/darker tints of the original colour.

Acknowledgement

vpstheme was created with the palettes package, which provides a comprehensive library for colour vectors and colour palettes using a new family of colour classes (palettes_colour, and palettes_palette) that always print as hex codes with colour previews.

See the following vignettes to learn how to use palletes with other packages:

• Using palettes with ggplot2

• Compatibility with other colour packages