Help choose the Leek group color palette

17 Nov 2016 By Jeff Leek

My research group just recently finish a paper where several different teams within the group worked on different analyses. If you are interested the paper describes the recount resource which includes processed versions of thousands of human RNA-seq data sets.

As part of this project each group had to contribute some plots to the paper. One thing that I noticed is that each person used their own color palette and theme when building the plots. When we wrote the paper this made it a little harder for the figures to all fit together - especially when different group members worked on a single panel of a multi-panel plot.

So I started thinking about setting up a Leek group theme for both base R and ggplot2 graphics. One of the first problems was that every group member had their own opinion about what the best color palette would be. So we are running a little competition to determine what the official Leek group color palette for plots will be in the future.

As part of that process, one of my awesome postdocs, Shannon Ellis, decided to collect some data on how people perceive different color palettes. The survey is here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfHMXVsl7pxYGarGowJpwgDSf9lA2DfWJjjEON1fhuCh6KkRg/viewform?c=0&w=1

If you have a few minutes and have an opinion about colors (I know you do!) please consider participating in our little poll and helping to determine the future of Leek group plots!