Brand Identity Management Using brand.yml Standard • brandr

Overview

brandr is an R package designed to facilitate brand identity management using the brand.yml standard. It provides functions to consistently access and apply brand colors, typography, and other visual elements across your R projects.

Unlike Posit’s thematic package, brandr offers more refined control over brand assets.

Please note that brandr is not affiliated with Posit or the developers of brand.yml.

Installation

You can install the released version of brandr from CRAN with:

install.packages("brandr")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("danielvartan/brandr")

Usage

brandr is equipped with several functions to help you use your _brand.yml file, like:

color_brand_sequential(), color_brand_diverging(), color_brand_qualitative(): Sequential, diverging, and qualitative brand color palettes
scale_brand(), scale_color_brand_d(), scale_color_brand_c(), scale_color_brand_b(), scale_fill_brand_d(), scale_fill_brand_c(), scale_fill_brand_b(): Discrete, continuous, and binned brand color scales for ggplot2
get_brand_color(): Get a brand color by name (e.g., primary)
get_brand_color_tint(): Get a brand color tint
get_brand_color_mix(): Get a mix of brand colors
get_brand_font(): Get a brand font by name (e.g., headings)

Example:

library(brandr)
library(ggplot2)
library(palmerpenguins)

penguins |>
  ggplot(aes(x = flipper_length_mm, fill = species)) +
    geom_histogram(alpha = 0.5, position = "identity") +
    scale_fill_brand_d() +
    labs(
      x = "Flipper Length (mm)",
      y = "Frequency",
      fill = "Species"
    )

Configuration

Path to `_brand.yml`

brandr will always look for a _brand.yml file in the root directory of your project. If the file is not found, an error message will be displayed. You can also set the path to the file manually using the options() function:

options(BRANDR_BRAND_YML = "PATH_TO_BRAND.YML")

Brand Color Scales

To control the colors of each brand color scale, assign hexadecimal color codes in a character vector to the following options:

BRANDR_COLOR_SEQUENTIAL: For sequential color scales
BRANDR_COLOR_DIVERGING: For diverging color scales
BRANDR_COLOR_QUALITATIVE: For qualitative color scales

You can use get_brand_color() to get the hexadecimal color codes from the _brand.yml file.

Example:

options(
 BRANDR_COLOR_SEQUENTIAL =
   get_brand_color(c("primary", "secondary")),
 BRANDR_COLOR_DIVERGING =
   get_brand_color(c("primary", "white", "secondary")),
 BRANDR_COLOR_QUALITATIVE =
   get_brand_color(c("primary", "secondary", "tertiary"))
)

Setting Brand Fonts/Typefaces

Currently, brandr does not support the use of custom fonts directly. This feature is planned for future releases.

In the meantime, you can use Yixuan Qiu’s showtext R package to apply custom fonts/typefaces to your plots.

Below is an example of how to use the Google Font Open Sans in all of your plots. This example assumes that the font files are located in a ttf folder within your project directory.

library(brandr)
library(ggplot2)
library(here)
library(sysfonts)
library(showtext)

font_paths(here("ttf"))

font_add(
  family = "open-sans",
  regular = here("ttf", "opensans-regular.ttf"),
  bold = here("ttf", "opensans-bold.ttf"),
  italic = here("ttf", "opensans-italic.ttf"),
  bolditalic = here("ttf", "opensans-bolditalic.ttf"),
  symbol = NULL
)

showtext_auto()

theme_set(
  theme(
    text = element_text(
      color = get_brand_color("black"),
      family = "open-sans",
      face = "plain"
    )
  )
)

License

brandr code is released under the MIT license.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, including bug reports. Take a moment to review the Guidelines for Contributing.

Acknowledgments

brandr brand identity is based on brand.yml brand identity.

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brandr