Theme Lab: Tune Family, Preset, and Rhythm

What Is This Page For?

Use this page to choose a visual direction before you retrofit or create vignettes. You can tune one parameter at a time and immediately see the effect on hierarchy, contrast, and page rhythm.

How Do You Use It?

1. Pick a family for color character (the four chips show its tones).
2. Pick a direction: warm homage or cool interaction.
3. Toggle style intensity to set structural emphasis (marker + rule weight).
4. Adjust content width to match prose density.

What Does Each Control Change?

• family: accent hue and contrast character for links, rules, the nested-square marker, and plot palettes (the four chips above show the active family’s tones).
• preset (direction): warm homage (cream ground, serif body, light code) vs cool interaction (grey ground, grotesk, dark code).
• style: structural weight (minimal, balanced, assertive).
• content_width: reading measure in ch units.

Can You Validate The Palette Quickly?

pal <- albersdown::albers_palette(params$family)
stopifnot(
  identical(names(pal), c("A900", "A700", "A500", "A300")),
  all(nzchar(unname(pal)))
)
knitr::kable(data.frame(tone = names(pal), hex = unname(pal)), format = "html")

Copy Into YAML

params:
  family: red
  preset: homage
  base_size: 13
  content_width: 80
  style: minimal

Example Plot

mtcars$grp <- factor(mtcars$cyl)
stopifnot(length(levels(mtcars$grp)) >= 3)

ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg, colour = grp)) +
  geom_point(size = 2.2) +
  labs(
    title = "Theme Lab preview",
    subtitle = "Tune family + preset + style, then copy YAML"
  )