Okabe-Ito color palette

The Okabe-Ito color palette was proposed by Okabe and Ito (2008) as a qualitative color palette that is accessible to people with a variety of forms of color vision deficiency. In addition to being accessible, it includes 9 vivid colors that are readily nameable and include colors that correspond to major primary and secondary colors (e.g., red, yellow, blue).

scale_color_okabeito(
  palette = "full",
  reverse = FALSE,
  order = 1:9,
  aesthetics = "color",
  ...
)

scale_fill_okabeito(
  palette = "full",
  reverse = FALSE,
  order = 1:9,
  aesthetics = "fill",
  ...
)

scale_colour_okabeito(
  palette = "full",
  reverse = FALSE,
  order = 1:9,
  aesthetics = "color",
  ...
)

scale_colour_oi(
  palette = "full",
  reverse = FALSE,
  order = 1:9,
  aesthetics = "color",
  ...
)

scale_color_oi(
  palette = "full",
  reverse = FALSE,
  order = 1:9,
  aesthetics = "color",
  ...
)

scale_fill_oi(
  palette = "full",
  reverse = FALSE,
  order = 1:9,
  aesthetics = "fill",
  ...
)

Arguments

palette

Character name of palette. Depending on the color scale, can be one of "full", "ice", "rainbow", "complement", "contrast", "light" (for dark themes), "black_first", full_original, or black_first_original. The latter three options are especially for the Okabe-Ito color palette. The default is NULL and either "contrast" or "gradient" is used (depending on whether discrete is TRUE or FALSE), which are the two scale useful for discrete or gradient color scales, respectively.

reverse

Boolean indicating whether the palette should be reversed.

order

A vector of numbers from 1 to 9 indicating the order of colors to use (default: 1:9)

aesthetics

A vector of names of the aesthetics that this scale should be applied to (e.g., c('color', 'fill')).

...

Additional arguments to pass to colorRampPalette().

Details

The Okabe-Ito palette is included in the base R grDevices::palette.colors(). These functions make this palette easier to use with ggplot2.

The original Okabe-Ito palette's "yellow" color is "#F0E442". This color is very bright and often does not show up well on white backgrounds (see here) for a discussion of this issue). Accordingly, by default, this function uses a darker more "amber" color for "yellow" ("#F5C710"). This color is the "yellow" color used in base R >4.0's default color palette. The palettes "full" and "black_first" use this darker yellow color. For the original yellow color suggested by Okabe and Ito ("#F0E442"), use palettes "full_original" or "black_first_original".

The Okabe-Ito palette is only available as a discrete palette. For color-accessible continuous variables, consider the viridis palettes.

References

Okabe, M., & Ito, K. (2008). Color universal design (CUD): How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to colorblind people. https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/#pallet (Original work published 2002)

Examples

library(ggplot2)
library(see)

ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  theme_modern() +
  scale_fill_okabeito()


ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) +
  geom_violin() +
  theme_modern() +
  scale_fill_oi(palette = "black_first")


# for the original brighter yellow color suggested by Okabe and Ito
ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) +
  geom_violin() +
  theme_modern() +
  scale_fill_oi(palette = "full")


ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) +
  geom_violin() +
  theme_modern() +
  scale_fill_oi(order = c(1, 5, 6, 2, 4, 3, 7))