mexicolors: A Mexican politics-inspired color palette generator

Building on Philip Waggoner's approach to designing color palettes in the amerika package, the mexicolors package offers a variety of a Mexican politics-inspired color palettes for a host of applications both in and out of politics.

Palette options range from only a few colors to several colors, but with discrete and continuous options to offer greatest flexibility to the user. mexicolors allows for a range of applications, from mapping brief discrete scales to continuous interpolated arrays including dozens of shades graded from green to red. See below for a list of the palettes followed by a few political and non-political examples.

Installation

Dev:

devtools::install_github("alexplatasl/mexicolors")
library(mexicolors)

Use

Users simply supply the name of the desired palette in the main function mexico_palette(), along with the number of colors desired from the palette (e.g., only 4 from a 5-color palette), and whether "continuous" or "discrete" type mapping is desired.

Palettes

1. morena: two shades of red and two shades of grey.
2. pri: four colors including green, white, grey, and red.
3. pan: four colors including three shades of blue and one shade of white.
4. prd: five colors including two shades of yellow, one shade of white, and two shades of grey.
5. cuatroT: eight colors including two shades of red, two shades of yellow, two shades of gray, and two shades of green.
6. ine: four colors including whine, mexican pink, grey, and black.
7. pvem: six colors including three shades of green, yellow, red, and black.
8. mc: eight colors including four shades of orange and four shades of gray..

Displaying each palette

mexico_palette("cuatroT")

mexico_palette("ine")

mexico_palette("morena")

mexico_palette("pri")

mexico_palette("pan")

mexico_palette("prd")

mexico_palette("pvem")

mexico_palette("mc")

Interpolating between existing colors based on the palettes using the "continuous" type

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "cuatroT", type = "continuous")

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "ine", type = "continuous")

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "morena", type = "continuous")

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "pri", type = "continuous")

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "pan", type = "continuous")

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "prd", type = "continuous")

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "pvem", type = "continuous")

mexico_palette(n = 50, name = "mc", type = "continuous")

Example Political Cases (Discrete and Continuous)

library(tidyverse)
# Continuous: "ideology" on a 100 point scale (hypothetical for demo purposes only)
data1 <- data.frame(sample(1:100, 3000, replace=TRUE))

data1 <- data1 %>%
  rename(id = sample.1.100..3000..replace...TRUE.) %>%
  as.data.frame()

ggplot(data1, aes(id)) +
  geom_bar(fill=mexico_palette(n = 100, name = "cuatroT", type = "continuous")) +
  labs(x = "Political Ideology (Liberal - Conservative)",
       y = "Count of Respondents") +
  theme_bw()

Non-Political Cases (5 and 7 level palettes)

library(tidyverse)

# 5-level (discrete) palette
ggplot(diamonds, aes(factor(cut), fill = factor(cut))) +
  geom_bar() + 
  scale_fill_manual(values = mexico_palette("cuatroT", 5, "discrete")) +
  theme_bw()

library(tidyverse)

# 7-level (discrete) palette
ggplot(diamonds, aes(factor(color), fill = factor(color))) +
  geom_bar() + 
  scale_fill_manual(values = mexico_palette("morena", 7, "continuous")) +
  theme_bw()

How do I get mexicolors?

mexicolors is stored and developed at this GitHub repository, https://github.com/alexplatasl/mexicolors/, along with an issue tracker for reporting bugs as well as suggesting package extensions and/or enhancements. In the spirit of open science, any level of interaction with the package is allowed.