8 ggplot themes to make your plots look great

ggplot2 is awesome. It enables people to easily make high quality data visualization plots. However, people who spent a lot of time with ggplot2 have love/hate relationship with the default ggplot2 theme, where a plot is on a grey background. The default ggplot2 theme is called theme_grey() or theme_gray(). In addition to the default theme, ggplot2 to has 7 other themes that can elevate your graphics. Here we will look at all 8 themes that are readily available with ggplot. One of my favorites is theme_bw() or theme_classic(). Learn these 8 ggplot2 themes and find out which is your favorite.

Let us use gapminder data to make a scatter plot and save the ggplot object. We will use the ggplot object in our examples with the themes for ggplot.

head(gapminder)
p_obj <- gapminder %>% 
  sample_n(200) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=lifeExp, y=gdpPercap)) + 
  geom_point(alpha=0.5)+
  scale_y_log10()  
p_obj

1. theme_gray()

The default theme of ggplot is grey. We can also specify grey theme with grey_theme() and add it as a layer.

grey <- p_obj +theme_gray() +labs(subtitle = "theme_gray()")
grey

2. theme_bw()

bw <- p_obj +theme_bw()+labs(subtitle = "theme_bw()")
bw

3. theme_classic()

classic <- p_obj + theme_classic() +labs(subtitle = "theme_classic()")
classic

4. theme_dark()

dark <- p_obj + theme_dark() +labs(subtitle = "theme_dark()")
dark

5. theme_light()

light <- p_obj + theme_light() + labs(subtitle = "theme_light()")
light

6. theme_linedraw()

linedraw <- p_obj + theme_linedraw() +labs(subtitle = "theme_linedraw()")
linedraw

7. theme_minimal()

minimal <- p_obj + theme_minimal() +labs(subtitle = "theme_minimal()")
minimal

8. theme_void()

void <- p_obj + theme_void()+labs(subtitle = "theme_void()")
void

library(gridExtra)
grid.arrange( grey, bw, light, dark, classic,linedraw, minimal, void, ncol=2)