Forbes Graph Makeover Challenge ggplot2 style

I recently came across the Forbes Graph Makeover Challenge (http://www.forbes.com/sites/naomirobbins/2012/11/27/graph-makeover-contest/), and decided to give it a shot. My goal was to create an entry using nothing but R code (that is, no post image processing at all), which to be totally honest, due to my lack of any experience at all with post image processing software/applications is the only way I could ever go about something like this. The great thing about this challenge is that it really pushed me to get out of my ggplot2 shell and explore facets of ggplot2 that I never did have a handle on.

I haven’t yet had any time to annotate and clean up the code; however, to make things easier to digest–if you are so inclined to work your way through it–I cut the code into layers that build successively on p so you can see what happens as you go along. Anyhow, here is the code (quick note–something happens when wordpress converts my R-code to HTML and I need to go back in and escape all of my “<-" in the code… for now just realize that until I fix them, these are getting converted to $lt; in "HTML-ese"):


forbes1 <- structure(list(TrafficSource = structure(c(3L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("Twitter", "LinkedIn", "Facebook"), class = "factor"), Type = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L), .Label = c("B2B", "B2C"), class = "factor"), Value = c(72L, 12L,16L, -84L, -15L, -1L)), .Names = c("TrafficSource", "Type", "Value"), row.names = c(NA, -6L), class = "data.frame")

cbPalette <- c("dodgerblue4", "gray35")

p <- ggplot(forbes1, aes(x= TrafficSource, y=Value, fill= Type, width = 0.7)) + geom_bar(color = "black", stat="identity", data=subset(forbes1, Type == "B2B")) + geom_bar(color = "black", stat="identity", data=subset(forbes1, Type == "B2C")) + scale_fill_manual(values = cbPalette)+ guides(fill=FALSE)

p <- p + ggtitle("Social Traffic Sources for\n B2B and B2C Companies") + theme(plot.title = element_text(lineheight=.8, face="bold", size=18), axis.text.x = element_text(vjust=0.2, size=18), axis.text.y = element_text(vjust=0.1, size=13), axis.title.y = element_text(face="bold", size=18))+ scale_x_discrete(name="")

abs_format <- function(){
function(x){
abs(x)
}
}
p <- p + scale_y_continuous(breaks=seq(-100, 100, 25), labels = abs_format(), limits=c(-100, 100), name= "% of Referral Traffic") + geom_hline(aes(yintercept= 0))

p <- p + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="Twitter", Type="B2B" ,Value=95, texthere="B2B"), size = 12, fontface=2, color="dodgerblue4") + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="Twitter", Type="B2B" ,Value=-93, texthere="B2C"), size = 12, fontface=2, color= "gray35")

p<- p + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="Twitter", Type="B2B" ,Value=30, texthere="12%") , size = 8, fontface=2) + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="Twitter", Type="B2B" ,Value=-30, texthere="15%"), size = 8, fontface=2)

p <- p + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="LinkedIn", Type="B2B" ,Value=30, texthere="16%"), size = 8, fontface=2) + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="LinkedIn", Type="B2B" ,Value=-30, texthere="1%"), size = 8, fontface=2)

p <- p + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="Facebook", Type="B2B" ,Value=30, texthere="72%"), size = 8, fontface=2) + geom_text(aes(TrafficSource,Value,Type,label = texthere), data.frame(TrafficSource="Facebook", Type="B2B" ,Value=-30, texthere="84%"), size = 8, fontface=2)

p

Here is the Example Image:

4 thoughts on “Forbes Graph Makeover Challenge ggplot2 style”

JNFoo on December 6, 2012 at 9:30 pm said:

I really like your aesthetics for the challenge. Simple and to the point.

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- connerpharmd on December 6, 2012 at 9:36 pm said:
  
  Many thanks JNFoo. I must admit that I was inspired by many that posted before me… especially Bob Rudis (http://rud.is/b/), and was given a huge nugget of help from Joran (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13737717/how-to-hijack-the-y-axis-on-a-negative-stacked-bar-chart)– who I think can also be found at (http://www.statisticalskier.com/).
  
  Reply ↓
  - JNFoo on December 6, 2012 at 9:58 pm said:
    
    Thank you for the links. I’m learning this stuff too 🙂 One modification for your chart – make the facebook numbers white or a lighter grey to may them easier to see, make all the %age labels bound in little light colored boxes.
connerpharmd on December 8, 2012 at 11:14 pm said:

Thanks for the comment. The great thing about ggplot2 is that this can easily be handled by adding a color aesthetic to the geom_text statement (http://docs.ggplot2.org/0.9.2.1/geom_text.html). Something along the lines of color=”white” should simply do the trick. As for creating colored boxes around the %-age labels that live outside of the bars, that might be a bit more tricky. Suffice it to say Hadley’s ggplot2 package is one that I’m sure many of us can’t live without! Yet another reason for me to send him a beer if ever I do run into him at a bar (aside from stringr, and reshape, which I use pretty regularly)!

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