Colours • BSOLTheme

The BSOLTheme package contains functions that return the colours used in the Birmingham and Solihul ICS’s branding. This Vignette will explain how to use these functions to set the colours in plots created with ggplot2.

List available colours

To view all of the possible colours available, you can use the following function:

bsol_theme_cols()
#>       green  light_blue      orange   deep_navy      purple    nhs_blue 
#>   "#8cedab"   "#4fbff0"   "#fc8700"   "#031d44"   "#b88ce3"   "#005EB8" 
#> light_slate    charcoal       white 
#>   "#b2b7b9"   "#2c2825"   "#ffffff"

The bsol_theme_cols function returns a named vectored of hex-encoded RGB values of colours.

If you are only interested in specific colours, you can specify them as arguments to the function, like so:

bsol_theme_cols("orange", "light_slate", "nhs_blue")
#>      orange light_slate    nhs_blue 
#>   "#fc8700"   "#b2b7b9"   "#005EB8"

Or, you can use one of the available palettes:

bsol_theme_cols(palette = "main")
#>      green light_blue     orange  deep_navy     purple 
#>  "#8cedab"  "#4fbff0"  "#fc8700"  "#031d44"  "#b88ce3"

The documentation for bsol_theme_cols lists all of the palettes that are available to use.

These colours are shown below.

Using the theme with ggplot2

If you want to use the Strategy Unit’s colours in your plots, you can use the scale_colour_bsol and scale_fill_bsol functions. For example, if you wish to use the main palette:

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, colour = Species)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_colour_bsol()

You can also change specify a different palette, and reverse the order like so:

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, colour = Species)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_colour_bsol(palette = "ics_purple", reverse = TRUE)

These functions by default are for discrete data. If you have continuous then you need to set the discrete argument to FALSE.

ggplot(faithfuld, aes(waiting, eruptions, fill = density)) +
  geom_tile() +
  scale_fill_bsol(discrete = FALSE, palette = "ics_orange", reverse = TRUE)