How to Change Background Color in ggplot2?

How to Change Background Color in ggplot2, To alter the background color of different elements in a ggplot2 plot, use the syntax below.

p + theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill = 'lightblue', color = 'purple'),
panel.grid.major = element_line(color = 'red', linetype = 'dotted'),
panel.grid.minor = element_line(color = 'green', size = 2))

As an alternative, you can utilize built-in ggplot2 themes to have the backdrop color changed for you. The following are some of the most typical themes.

p + theme_bw() #white background and grey gridlines

p + theme_minimal() #no background annotations

p + theme_classic() #axis lines but no gridlines

These examples demonstrate how to apply this syntax in real-world situations.

Example 1: Specify Custom Background Color

The code below demonstrates how to make a straightforward scatterplot in ggplot2 with the standard grey background.

library(ggplot2)

Let’s create a data frame

df <- data.frame(x=c(1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 9, 12, 15),
                 y=c(13, 14, 14, 12, 17, 21, 22, 28, 30, 31))

df
    x  y
1   1 22
2   2 24
3   3 20
4   4 10
5   5 37
6   6 25
7   7 20
8   8 18
9   9 12
10 10 15

Now let’s create a scatterplot

p <- ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
       geom_point()

Now we can display the scatterplot

p

The panel’s background color, as well as the major and minor gridlines, can all be changed using the following code.

p + theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill = 'lightblue', color = 'purple'),
          panel.grid.major = element_line(color = 'red', linetype = 'dotted'),
          panel.grid.minor = element_line(color = 'green', size = 2))

Example 2: Change the background color using the built-in theme

The following code demonstrates how to use different pre-built ggplot2 themes to modify the plots’ backgrounds automatically.

p + theme_bw() #white background and grey gridlines

p + theme_minimal() #no background annotations

p + theme_classic() #axis lines but no gridlines