The Ugly Plot Contest
The goal is to create a ggplot figure that breaks all the rules of sound figure design.
A good plot has the following:
- Easily distinguishable colors (colorblind-friendly) or grayscale
- Properly labeled axes with appropriate scales
- Legible font size
- If a legend is present, it is easy to read and uses intuitive labels
- The correct geoms for the data types
- Doesn’t hide data distributions by simplifying into a single meaningless geom
- Facets that contain more than one data point, if there are facets at all
- Proper aesthetic scales … i.e., not a color gradient if a variable is discrete
See this very good site for a detailed look at what makes a good graph.
Making a truly bad graph can be automatic, but it takes a lot of skill to really tweak ggplot to get it to do what you want. That’s the point of this exercise; you will get practice at manipulating all aspects of how your plot is printed.
We will turn these in in-class. You will run your code live to generate your ugly plot.
Here are some ugly plots from previous students… a gallery of deepest shame:
I said no pie charts. But I also said I wanted the rules of good design to be broken. Fair is fair.
starwars never looked so glaringly bad.
