Creating compelling data visualisations in R with ggplot2

data-visualisation
r-how-to
dataviz-design-system

A 2-hour code-along workshop in person at the University of Glasgow, with a “choose your own story” approach and plenty of reusable snippets

Published

June 10, 2026

In this workshop, participants are encouraged to pick one of three interactive visualisations built with ggplot2, and adapt them for their own data stories. All the graphs make use of our theme_glasgow() and use readily available datasets. Packages are all available on CRAN, and are identied through namespacing (package::function()).

Choose the graph that seems most useful for the data you’re working on, and let’s see what we can make!

Our code gists and the tricks they include

  • Our theme_glasgow()
    • new geom = element_geom() with its caveats
    • relative text sizes
    • tooltips css styling
  • A faceted bar graph
    • summarising data
    • creating small multiples
    • adapting the theme to style panels well
  • A line and dot graph
    • adding annotations at specific points along a timeline
    • using a “hero colour” and colour variants of for the rest
    • creating line-end annotations
  • A jitter graph
    • making geom_jitter less messy
    • adding summary annotations with a different dataset
    • moving annotations out of the way of the (categorical) data

Additional resources

Reuse

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:
“Creating Compelling Data Visualisations in R with Ggplot2.” 2026. June 10, 2026. https://www.cararthompson.com/talks/uog-workshop/.