That's a wrap for the #dataviz workshop I've been leading for the Nordic Society of Human Genetics and Precision Medicine's 2025 conference in Copenhagen.

In the run up to the conference, I was sent a plot which it typical in the field (and published in one of the Nature journals). Here's my redo.

Here's the original with ggtext, in terms of line spacing. And the equivalent with marquee with the \n\n approach.

That was quick! Thanks. Works like a charm!

The last piece of the puzzle, if I may, is getting a line break in there too. What's the best way to do that?
- \n doesn't break the line, \n\n gives me more space than I'd like
- if I hit return twice, we get some funky formatting...

#ggplot folks - I'm updating my teaching materials to move to {marquee} where I can. How do we change font size on the fly in a geom_marquee()?
I know we can change colours and bold/italics, etc, but how do we change size? I'm looking for the equivalent of this to add text hierarchy to annotations 👇

TLDR: the elegant solution is to create a function which grabs the background theme information and applies it to a new plot output using {cowplot}.

Feel free to reuse it!

You've got a nice custom #ggplot2 theme, and you use it to make a map or any other graph with fixed coordinates, and the background does this...

I've written up a blog post of the different solutions I explored, from the super hacky to the more elegant.

www.cararthompson.com/posts/2025-0...

It's pretty wild what you can do with geom_text(), transparency, and some careful rescaling of superimposed images at different rates.

Here's an extract from a video I'll post more about tomorrow. One of the most challenging projects I've had the privilege of working on.

For today's project, I'm having to do a bit of copy-pasting of text from a PDF to add information to a quarto website. Which brings me back to one of my favourite #rstats tricks, and possibly my favourite function name! stringr::str_squish()

Merry Christmas, everyone! 🎄 🎵

Name the tune! All done with #rstats + #ggplot2 🤓

I finally got round to exploring using grid::linearGradient()!

Here's the code: gist.github.com/cararthompso...

P.S. There was some controversy in my family about the tune, but this version looked nicer 😊

Festive mode activated 🥳

This has been a brilliant year at Building Stories with Data. I'm so grateful for all the projects I've been able to work on, for the encouragement from my peers, for inspiring conferences and for reconnecting with everyone on here!

"I really like the overall look, but I'm finding it hard to tell the difference between the turquoise and the green - is it possible to redo all the graphs with a different colour?"

A happy reminder of the joy of setting up colours sensibly when creating dataviz with #rstats. Thank you past self!

I had talked during the workshop about the trick of blending in a common colour and how I use {monochromeR} to do that (R package or shinyApp, link below!), but that's about as far as I got.

www.cararthompson.com/shinyapps/20...

I'm keen to explore this further. What would others recommend?

I really enjoyed today's #dataviz workshop with The Data Lab - Innovation Centre. The recording is out already!

I've uploaded it along with the slides and possibly the most comprehensive set of tool-agnostic resources I've compiled to date.

www.cararthompson.com/talks/datala...

P.S. I really enjoyed the ice breaker on our badges and the prompt we were given: "Data is..." Here's my answer.

And no, the necklace wasn't a data physicalisation project, but I love how many times I was asked that question. #foundMyTribe

Thanks again @graphichunters.bsky.social !

If it's a question of comparing all 50 at once and you have an easy yes/no or two categories,, you'll need something small but still readable, and ordering goes a long way in helping people make sense of what's going on. This is one I did a while ago. Code here: github.com/cararthompso...

Since I can't figure out how to share the GIF showing the transition between the original plot and the styled one, here's the original.

If anyone can keep me right on why the GIF doesn't show here despite showing in a preview, I'll be very grateful! 👵👨‍💻

I ❤️ #ggplot. So much fun creating dataviz design system packages to do all the heavy-lifting. Creativity + accessibility + coding solutions that save teams a lot of time 🤓

Just added a few extra bells and whistles to this one, including exploring {marquee} for captions and CSS styling for tooltips.