The depictr colour palettes — depictr

Colourblind-aware palettes shared by every depictr plot. The qualitative palette is based on the Okabe-Ito set (Okabe & Ito, 2008), a widely recommended categorical palette that stays distinguishable under the common forms of colour-vision deficiency, with the depictr brand blue leading. The sequential and diverging palettes are perceptually ordered single-hue and red-blue ramps.

Usage

depictr_palette(n = NULL, type = c("qualitative", "sequential", "diverging"))

Arguments

n: Number of colours to return. If NULL (the default) the full qualitative palette is returned. For the qualitative palette an n larger than the available base colours is interpolated; the sequential and diverging palettes are ramps and accept any n. Interpolating the built-in qualitative palette beyond its eight base colours loses the colour-vision-deficiency guarantee and warns, so facet the groups or use the sequential ramp when many groups are needed.
type: Palette type: "qualitative" (categorical groups), "sequential" (ordered low-to-high) or "diverging" (a midpoint with two directions).

Value

A character vector of hex colour codes.

Details

The guarantee belongs to the eight Okabe-Ito colours themselves, not to any number of colours: past eight the qualitative palette has to interpolate between them, and the interpolated colours sit close enough together to fail the package's own colour-distance check. That case warns rather than handing back colours under a guarantee it cannot keep.

The qualitative palette can be overridden globally with options(depictr.palette = ) (see depictr_options()); when set, that custom palette replaces the built-in Okabe-Ito set and is interpolated when more colours are requested than it provides. The sequential and diverging ramps are unaffected.

References

Okabe M, Ito K (2008). “Color Universal Design (CUD): How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to colorblind people.” https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/. Accessed 2026-06-14.

Examples

depictr_palette(3)
#> [1] "#005b96" "#e69f00" "#009e73"
depictr_palette(7, type = "sequential")
#> [1] "#E6EFF5" "#98BFDA" "#4A8FC0" "#2475AB" "#005B96" "#034678" "#08315A"
scales::show_col(depictr_palette())