"

Every day a school day when creating custom R packages!

Today, I’m making maps and a documentation how-to about maps, because… the client makes maps and needs to see how to apply the colours we’ve created to them! Tomorrow, it will be a swimmer plot for a different client.
Author
Affiliation

Building Stories with Data

Published

July 29, 2025

The fun thing about creating documentation for different clients’ dataviz design packages is that they all have different needs. Today, I’m making maps and a documentation how-to about maps, because… the client makes maps and needs to see how to apply the colours we’ve created to them! Tomorrow, it will be a swimmer plot for a different client, which might prove a good excuse to play around with ggplot’s gradients…

Anyway, for today, {giscoR}, projections, geom_sf() and the weird and wonderful world of freely available mapping data (with as little political commentary as possible), here I come!

Working through tutorials on how to do something I’m less familiar with is always a good reminder not to take things for granted in the instructions I provide to others. Humbling, but also a great way of sharpening those tutorial-writing skills!

This is turning into one of those “maybe this should be a blog post…” pieces of documentation, as I’m adding in a few things about sorting out the awkward background size restrictions we get with a fixed coordinate system… Might as well share the tricks!

Reuse

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:
Thompson, Cara. 2025. “Every Day a School Day When Creating Custom R Packages!” July 29, 2025. https://www.cararthompson.com/posts/2025-07-29-creating-documentation-for-different-clients/.