Graph customization

Once you have a basic graph, you may want to further alter its appearance. Some common customizations include:

• changing axis labels, titles, and captions (using labs())
• specifying colors within the graph (e.g. with scale_fill_manual)
• applying a theme() to the graph, changing its overall appearance (e.g. theme_dark(), theme_bw(), theme_classic(),theme_minimal()

You can also change individual aspects of your them inside of the theme() call. For specifics of working with theme(), see .

To see these customizations in action, start with the scatterplot showing penguin bill length and body mass by island (created above), and add a few lines to change title, color, and labels:

ggplot(data = penguins, 
       mapping = aes(x = bill_length_mm, y = body_mass_g, color = island)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.7) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("magenta3", "darkorange", "blue4")) +
  labs(x = "Bill length (mm)",
       y = "Body mass (g)",
       title = "Palmer Penguins",
       subtitle = "Examining penguin body mass and bill length") + 
  theme_bw()

To read more about ggplot2, see the chapter about data visualization. More extensive documentation can be found on the .