The main takeaways are:

1) Ggplot customization possibilities are pretty endless.
2) Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all!

🎄🎄🎄

That code shows other cool things too, like how we added in a new font ("Grand Hotel") for the ggplot title.

We used the {showtext} package for this: font_add_google() loads the font from Google Fonts, and showtext_auto() ensures R applies the font to the plot.

Repeatedly rerunning the code is quite fun

And how did we get Santa's coordinates?

Since he didn't share his location, we created a function (get_random_night_coords()) to randomly generate coordinates of a location with a current local time between 11pm and 3am, assuming those are his working hours!

Close enough!

Both of these figures are created with ggplot2, and use a saved PNG file of Santa.

geom_image() from {ggimage} places the image at specified coordinates, reading from the file path.

Here's the ggplot code for the second figure:

And if you want his current location:

coalesce() is from the {dplyr} package. It returns the first non-missing value from a set of columns, based on the order you specify.

It’s not just for dates, but for any use-case where you need to pick one value from across columns!

Can you recommend any other holiday or Christmas-related R packages? We'd love to know!

Here's the code if you like the "minimalist" aesthetic.

That said, it does show the versality of ggplot!

P.s. Before finding the {christmas} package I was ready to make this the main event for this post:

And finally, if you want the function code pasted above, you can get it from the Applied Epi Community: community.appliedepi.org/t/custom-ggp...

Enjoy!

#RStats #Dataviz

You can make the function more complex, but don't overdo it - too many arguments could become hard to understand and edit!

It's all about balance and the best solution for your problem🤓

Learn more here:
epirhandbook.com/en/new_pages...
ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/ti...

Want to further customize colours? 🎨

The example above uses the same colour palette for each plot, with scale_fill_brewer().

For custom colours, you can also define a palette inside scale_fill_manual() - or as a separate object that you refer to (as discussed yesterday).

Why the squiggly brackets {{x}}? 🤔 They're for tidy evaluation!

{{ }} allows ggplot() to recognize the inputs for "xvalue" and "fillvalue" as column names from your data.

Without them, your function won’t know how to evaluate these column names properly!