Make “Solar System” Plots With {ggsolar}

I was cranking out a blog post for work earlier this week that shows off just how many integrations our platform has. I won’t blather about that content here, but as I was working on it, I really wanted to show off all the integrations.

A table seemed far too boring.

Several categorized unordered lists seemed too unwieldy.

Then, it dawned on me that I could make a visual representation of all the integration partners we have by thinking of the entire integrations’ ecosystem as a “universe” with each category being a “solar system” of that universe.

I’ve been leaning more heavily on javsascript for datavis these days, but I will always be more comfortable in {ggplot2}, so I headed to R to design a way to:

• generate concentric orbits for “n” solar systems
• randomize the placement of the planets in each ring
• make a decent plot!

I worked with one of the most amazing designers on the planet (heh) to come up with some stellar (heh) styling for it, and this was the result:

I took the styling guidance and wrapped the messy, individual functions I had into a new {ggsolar} package, you can find at https://github.com/hrbrmstr/ggsolar.

It’s pretty raw, and I need to “geomify” it at some point, but it has

• a function to generate the concentric circle polygons
• another one to identify a random point on each ring
• a naive plotting function, and
• a theme cleanup function for decent output.

The default is to generate uniformly distributed concentric circles, but you have the option of supplying a custom radii vector to make it more “real”/“solar-sysetm-y”.

Here’s the general flow:

# sol_planets is a built in vector of our system's planet names
sol_orbits <- generate_orbits(sol_planets)

set.seed(1323) # this produced a decent placements

# naive but it works! You can specify your own point picker, too.
placed_planets <- randomize_planet_positions(sol_orbits)

# do the thing!
plot_orbits(
  orbits = sol_orbits, 
  planet_positions = placed_planets,
  label_planets = TRUE,
  label_family = hrbrthemes::_es_bold
) +
  hrbrthemes::theme_ipsum_es(grid="") +
  coord_equal() +
  labs(
    title = "Sol",
    caption = "Pluto is 100% a planet"
  ) +
  theme_enhance_solar()

Random Systems

I included a generate_random_planets() function that uses a hidden Markov model to create believable planetary names, so you can now make your own universe with {ggplot2}!

set.seed(42)
(rando_planets <- generate_random_planets(12))

rando_orbits <- generate_orbits(rando_planets)

set.seed(123) # this produced decent placements

placed_planets <- randomize_planet_positions(rando_orbits)

plot_orbits(
  orbits = rando_orbits, 
  planet_positions = placed_planets,
  label_planets = TRUE,
  label_family = hrbrthemes::_es_bold
) +
  hrbrthemes::theme_ipsum_es(grid="") +
  coord_equal() +
  labs(
    title = "Rando System"
  ) +
  theme_enhance_solar()

FIN

Kick the tyres, use {gganimate} to make some animations, and be the ruler of your own universe! (We’re going to try to generate team “org charts” with these later in the week, so be creative, too!).