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Crayon colors in R

Last night I was working on a talk on creating effective graphs. Mostly, I needed to update the colors, as there’d been some gaudy ones in its previous form (e.g., slide 22).

I usually pick colors using the crayons in the Mac Color Picker. But that has just 40 crayons, and I wanted more choices.

That led me to the list of Crayola crayon colors on wikipedia. I wrote a ruby script to grab the color names and codes and added them to my R/broman package.

Use brocolors("crayons") to get the list of colors. For example, to get “Tickle Me Pink,” use

library(broman)
pink <- brocolors("crayons")["Tickle Me Pink"]

Use plot_crayons() to get the following summary plot of the colors:

Crayon colors

You can install the R/broman package using install_github in devtools, (specifically, install_github("kbroman/broman")) or wait a day or two and the version with this code will be on CRAN.

Update: See also Two more points about crayon colors.

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This entry was posted on 7 May 2014 at 11:05 am and is filed under R. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Responses to “Crayon colors in R”

  1. annoporci Says:
    7 May 2014 at 1:57 pm

    Very nice, I’m keen to give it a try.

    > library(“broman”)
    > pink <- brocolors("crayons")["Tickle Me Pink"]
    Error: could not find function "brocolors"

    Tried this: install.packages("broman", type = "source"), got this: broman_0.48-2.tar.gz, but still the Error message above. Any other packages needed? Am I forgetting something obvious? Thanks.

    • annoporci Says:
      7 May 2014 at 2:00 pm

      install_github(“kbroman/broman”)

      ends with:

      Warning message:
      package ‘’ is not available (for R version 3.1.0)

    • Karl Broman Says:
      7 May 2014 at 2:06 pm

      Weird; does packageVersion(“broman”) indicate 0.48.2? Can you use any of the other functions in the package? For example, dec2hex(200)

      I’m having similar problems with install_github. I’m not sure what’s up.

    • Karl Broman Says:
      7 May 2014 at 2:08 pm

      If I use remove.packages(“broman”) and then install_github(“kbroman/broman”), I still get that warning, but it does work.

  2. beckmw Says:
    7 May 2014 at 2:49 pm

    I greatly appreciate your top 10 horrible figures… perhaps also an example of the peer review process gone awry!

  3. gillenwatersblog Says:
    29 Nov 2017 at 11:03 am

    Is it possible to use your broman package to use crayon colors in a plot like a bar chart? How would I define or call the color?

    • Karl Broman Says:
      29 Nov 2017 at 1:36 pm

      crayons() gives you a vector with all of the colors.

      Or give it some partial names to get a vector of chosen colors.

      my_colors <- crayons(c("tickle", "cadet", "robin", "apricot", "outrageous"))

      Use it in barplot() via the col argument, like so:

      my_data <- setNames( runif(5, 0, 20), LETTERS[1:5])
      barplot(my_data, col=my_colors)

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