Rothko: A Set of Color Palettes for R

March 3, 2021

Rothko is a set of color palettes for R in the form of an R package. It follows directly from Karthik Ram’s wesanderson package, but instead uses color palettes derived from the paintings of Mark Rothko. I used ImageMagick to get these palettes, but there’s many websites out there that can do the same thing.

Installation

It’s simple to install, and has options for both continuous and discrete data. Install it using the following commands:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("mmerrittsmith/Rothko")

Usage & Examples

The palettes are named after the paintings they are derived from. This leads to some having rather long names like “Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red”. Others are named simply “Untitled 1949”. My favorites are shown below under the command used to generate them.

rothko_palette("Number 10")

rothko_palette("Light Cloud, Dark Cloud")

rothko_palette("Number 16")

You can use these palettes in the same way you would use any other R color palette, for example as an argument to the scale_fill_gradientn function in ggplot2.