Using Icons in Figures with {ggsvg}

Abstract

Learn how to insert icons into your plots using the {ggsvg} package.

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Have you ever seen a figure with cute little icons representing data points and thought how you would love to recreate that? I’m here to tell you that you can and the ggsvg package makes it super simple.

All you have to do is:

1. Load in the ggsvg package

2. Figure out which icon you want to use from the ones available here

3. Save the url for your chosen icon to read into your gpplot code

4. Use geom_point_svg in your ggplot code referencing your saved url (FC 2022)

Let’s run through an example with the palmerpenguins dataset (Horst, Hill, and Gorman 2020). Checkout the package website for some more info and fun artwork! We’re going to subset these data to only include female Chinstrap penguins so that we have fewer data points to plot.

Example

# load libraries
library(palmerpenguins)
library(tidyverse)
# install.packages('rsvg')
# remotes::install_github('coolbutuseless/ggsvg')
library(rsvg)
library(ggsvg)

# find the icon you want and save the url for later reference following this format
svg_url <- 'https://www.svgrepo.com/download/133788/penguin.svg'
svg_txt <- paste(readLines(svg_url), collapse = "\n")

# filter the penguin data to only female Chinstrap penguins
chinstrap <- penguins %>% 
  filter(species == "Chinstrap", sex == "female")

# plot the data with the selected icon used instead of points
ggplot(chinstrap) + 
  geom_point_svg(aes(body_mass_g, flipper_length_mm), svg = svg_txt) + 
  labs(x = "Body Mass (g)", y = "Flipper Length (mm)", 
       title = "Comparing body mass and flipper length of female Chinstrap penguins") +
  theme_classic()

References

FC, Mike. 2022. “Ggsvg: SVG Glyphs for Ggplot.” https://github.com/coolbutuseless/ggsvg.

Horst, Allison Marie, Alison Presmanes Hill, and Kristen B Gorman. 2020. “Palmerpenguins: Palmer Archipelago (Antarctica) Penguin Data.” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3960218.