Developing a data visualisation style

The Trafford Data Lab supports decision-making in Trafford, a local authority in Greater Manchester, by revealing patterns in data through visualisation. It is committed to publishing open data and using open source tools to encourage a transparent and reproducible analytical workflow.

Style guides are a set of standards that help everyone in an organisation to create consistent, high quality outputs. Style guides may be prescriptive about the typeface and colour palettes but often include good design practice for data visualisation.

and tweaking non-data elements like the background,

axis tick marks,

grid lines,

plot title and axis labels.

Once you are happy with your modifications you can save them as a theme object that you can apply to all of your chart outputs.

Written by Henry Partridge, Manager of the Trafford Data Lab

Wickham, Hadley. ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer-Verlag New York, 2016.

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