Making Better Figures with ggplot2

Principles of effective figure making

Before we get into the meat of how to most efficiently use the ggplot2 package for plotting, it’s useful to take a moment to talk about what makes a good figure. What is it that makes a nice-looking figure, one that is suitable for publication or use in a presentation? We would argue that there are three hallmarks of a good figure:

• Judicious use of color
• Large clear text and labels
• Efficient usage of plot space

It’s often useful to create multiple panels to show different aspects of our data. These fundamentals are the same whether we’re making our figures in R or not.