piratepal(): Color palettes for R Pirates

piratepal()

piratepal() is a function that returns color palettes. The function has four main arguments:

• palette: The specific palette you want to use. For example, palette = "appletv" will give you the appletv palette. You can also specify palette = "all" to see all the palettes, or palette = "random" to get a random palette.

• trans: A number between 0 and 1 indicating how transparent to make the colors. 1 is fully transparent (e.g. invisible), and 0 is not transparent at all. Personally, I like at least slightly transparent colors (e.g.; trans = .3)

• length.out: An optional number indicating how many colors to return (if length.out is larger than the number of colors in the palette, they will just be repeated).

• plot.result: A logical value indicating whether or not to display the palette.

Examples

To see all of the palettes, run piratepal("all")

piratepal(palette = "all")

Once you find a palette you’d like to use, you can return the colors as a vector by specifying the name of the palette in the palette argument. Here is the Google palette

piratepal(palette = "google")

##        blue         red      yellow       green 
## "#3D79F3FF" "#E6352FFF" "#F9B90AFF" "#34A74BFF"

If you want to see a palette in detail (and possibly some images that inspired the palette), include the argument plot.result = T. Here’s where the southpark palette comes from.

piratepal(palette = "southpark", 
          trans = .5,
          plot.result = T)

You can look at a random palette by setting palette = "random":

piratepal("random", plot.result = T)

## Here's the xmen palette

Some of the palettes are darker than others. Here’s the nightmare-inducing evildead palette (I’ll up the transparency to .5 to make it a bit less scarring…)

piratepal(palette = "evildead",
          trans = .5,
          plot.result = T)

Here’s a scatterplot using the xmen palette with piratepal('xmen', trans = .5):

xmen.cols <- piratepal(palette = "xmen",  
                     trans = .5)

x <- rnorm(100)
y <- x + rnorm(100)

plot(x = x, y = y, 
     col =  xmen.cols,
     pch = 16,
     cex = 2,
     main = "piratepal('xmen', trans = .5)")

# Set up balloons
balloon.colors <- piratepal("basel", trans = .2)
balloon.x <- rnorm(500, 0)
balloon.y <- rnorm(500, 4, 1)

par(mar = rep(.1, 4))
plot(1, xlim = c(-15, 7), ylim = c(-15, 7),
    xlab = "", ylab = "", type = "n", 
    xaxt = "n", yaxt = "n", bty = "n")

# skyline
start.x <- runif(200, -15, 7)
start.y <- sort(runif(200, -15, -12), decreasing = T)
heights <- runif(200, 2, 4)
widths <- runif(200, .25, 1.5)
  
rect(start.x, start.y, start.x + widths, start.y + heights, 
     col = "white", border = gray(.4))

# house
rect(-2, -6, 2, -2)
polygon(c(-2, 0, 2),
        c(-2, 0, -2))
rect(-.5, -6, .5, -4)
points(.3, -5)

# strings
line.start.x <- rnorm(500, 0, .2)
line.start.y <- -1 + rnorm(500, 0, .1)
segments(line.start.x, 
         line.start.y, 
         balloon.x, balloon.y, 
         lty = 1, col = gray(.5, .1), lwd = .2)

# balloons
points(balloon.x, balloon.y, pch = 21, 
       bg = balloon.colors,
       col = gray(.9), cex = rnorm(100, 2, .3))