While strolling through a friend’s copy of The Economist today, admiring a very coherent visual identity they chose, I remembered reading this blog post about R having such a theme a while back.
Lead by curiosity, I gave it a try.
Quick instructions…
Install R
If you don’t have it already, you can install R easilty in Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install r-base r-base-dev libcurl3-dev sudo R
Also, I warmly recommend RStudio as an IDE for R.
Install ggplot2 and ggthemes
Once you started R as sudo, let’s install the packages:
install.packages("ggplot2") install.packages("devtools") library("devtools") install_github("ggthemes", "jrnold")
Start playing
You can find some nice examples in the ggplot2 documentation. I tried this one:
library("ggplot2") library("ggthemes") p <- ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) p + theme_economist() + geom_jitter(aes(colour = cyl)) + ggtitle("Kermit & the R-conomist")
An encountered problem
I couldn’t install devtools in Ubuntu, which is necessary to quickly get the github-hosted ggthemes package, because RCurl couldn’t be configured. To solve it, a small hint in this FAQ lead me to a solution in the end. You need to have this development version of the libcurl package:
sudo apt-get install libcurl3-dev