Description
Color Palettes Inspired by India's Natural Landscapes.
Description
Curated color palettes drawn from India's natural beauty - Himalayan snow, Thar dunes, Kerala backwaters, Andaman reefs, Spiti's cold desert, Kashmir's autumn chinar, and more. Provides discrete and continuous palettes with first-class 'ggplot2' integration through scale_color_prakriti() and scale_fill_prakriti(), plus base graphics helpers for displaying palettes.
README.md
prakriti 
30 color palettes for R, each one pulled from an Indian landscape. Himalayan ice. Thar dunes at sunset. Flamingos over the Rann. Bioluminescent shores off Havelock. The autumn chinar canopy in Kashmir.
Palettes come in three types (sequential, diverging, qualitative) and plug straight into ggplot2 with scale_color_prakriti() and scale_fill_prakriti(). They also work fine with base graphics, lattice, or anything else that takes hex codes.
Installation
# Install from GitHub
remotes::install_github("orijitghosh/prakriti")
Quick look
library(prakriti)
# See what's available
prakriti_names()
prakriti_info()
# Pull a palette as a hex vector
prakriti_palette("thar")
#> [1] "#FFF0A3" "#FFB727" "#F57D15" "#D94701" "#8B1A04" "#3D0C02"
# Interpolate to any length
prakriti_palette("himalaya", n = 50, type = "continuous")
Display all palettes
display_prakriti()
ggplot2
Qualitative palettes default to discrete scales. Sequential and diverging palettes default to continuous. Override with discrete = TRUE/FALSE.
library(ggplot2)
# Categorical
ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, color = Species)) +
geom_point(size = 3) +
scale_color_prakriti("valley_of_flowers")
# Continuous fill
ggplot(faithfuld, aes(waiting, eruptions, fill = density)) +
geom_raster(interpolate = TRUE) +
scale_fill_prakriti("himalaya")
# Diverging
cor_df <- as.data.frame(as.table(cor(mtcars)))
names(cor_df) <- c("x", "y", "r")
ggplot(cor_df, aes(x, y, fill = r)) +
geom_tile() +
scale_fill_prakriti("mehrangarh", limits = c(-1, 1))
The palettes
| Name | Type | What it looks like | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | himalaya | seq | Blinding snow, glacial turquoise, bottomless sky |
| 2 | thar | seq | Blazing dunes, saffron sunset, scorched earth |
| 3 | backwaters | seq | Luminous palms reflected in emerald water |
| 4 | western_ghats | qual | Orchids, laterite, kingfishers, butterflies |
| 5 | rann | div | White salt flats, flamingo shock-pink, violet dusk |
| 6 | valley_of_flowers | qual | Every alpine wildflower color at once |
| 7 | andaman | qual | Electric turquoise, fire coral, bleached sand |
| 8 | nilgiri | seq | Blue-green mountains vanishing into mist |
| 9 | spiti | div | Indigo night sky crashing into scorched ochre |
| 10 | kaziranga | qual | Elephant grass, rhino armor, river mud, tiger flash |
| 11 | chilika | seq | Flamingo clouds over pewter lagoon at first light |
| 12 | mehrangarh | div | Jodhpur's electric blue under golden hour |
| 13 | pangong | seq | Pangong Tso shifting turquoise to ultramarine to ink |
| 14 | sundarbans | qual | Neon mangrove, dark tidal roots, tiger-flame |
| 15 | hampi | seq | Rose-gold boulders catching sunset fire |
| 16 | gulmarg | qual | Blinding snow, vivid meadow, deodar against indigo |
| 17 | loktak | qual | Amber dawn, floating green phumdis on deep teal |
| 18 | kaas | qual | Explosive wildflower carpets on the plateau |
| 19 | darjeeling | div | Kanchenjunga on fire, plunging into tea-estate green |
| 20 | chinar | seq | Gold to vermilion to smoldering embers |
| 21 | ganges | seq | Silt gold, monsoon green, deep current |
| 22 | coorg | qual | Coffee blossoms, red laterite, rain-soaked green |
| 23 | kutch_textile | qual | Mirrorwork silver, indigo, turmeric, madder |
| 24 | jaisalmer | div | Sandstone fort at noon cooling into blue twilight |
| 25 | munnar | seq | Rolling tea carpets, bright flush to deep shade |
| 26 | ladakh_monastery | qual | Prayer-flag primaries against barren rock |
| 27 | chambal_ravines | seq | Bone white, khaki, terracotta, deep shadow |
| 28 | nocturn | seq | Bioluminescent shores, ink sky to starlight |
| 29 | konkan | qual | Laterite cliffs, coconut spray, Arabian Sea teal |
| 30 | corbett | div | Gold mist, tiger-stripe amber, deep sal canopy |
seq = sequential / div = diverging / qual = qualitative
API reference
| Function | What it does |
|---|---|
prakriti_palette(name) | Returns hex vector. Args: n, type, direction |
scale_color_prakriti(name) | ggplot2 color scale (also scale_colour_prakriti) |
scale_fill_prakriti(name) | ggplot2 fill scale |
display_prakriti() | Plot one or all palettes |
prakriti_names() | Character vector of palette names |
prakriti_info() | Data frame with name, type, length, inspiration |
Full docs: ?prakriti_palette or see the pkgdown site.
Cookbook
The pkgdown site has full articles with rendered plots:
- Getting started - installation, discovery, basic ggplot2 usage
- Palette gallery - all 30 palettes as swatches, continuous ramps, and a metadata table
- Sequential & diverging recipes - heatmaps, contours, calendar tiles, correlation matrices, anomaly maps
- Qualitative recipes - scatter plots, stacked areas, donut charts, ridgelines, dark-mode density
Contributing
Issues and PRs welcome. If you have a landscape in mind for a new palette, open an issue with reference photos and suggested hex codes.
License
MIT. See LICENSE.