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.

Start with family and preset, then tune style, then adjust content width. That order gives the fastest path to a coherent page.

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.

Family red lapis ochre teal green violet

Direction homage (warm) interaction (cool)

Style minimal balanced assertive

Content width (ch)

A900 A700 A500 A300

family=red | preset=homage | style=minimal | width=66ch

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 or assertive).
• Content width: the reading measure in ch units, for this preview only. The theme sets it (66ch in homage, 64ch in interaction); it is not a format option.

Can You Validate The Palette Quickly?

# the format sets the albersdown.family option to the vignette's family
pal <- albersdown::albers_palette(getOption("albersdown.family", "red"))
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")

tone	hex
A900	#760906
A700	#AE1703
A500	#D74A21
A300	#F7A885

Copy Into YAML

Put the choice in the vignette’s output format:

output:
  albersdown::albers_vignette:
    family: red        # red, lapis, ochre, teal, green, violet
    preset: homage     # homage or interaction
    style: minimal     # minimal, balanced or assertive

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) +
  albersdown::scale_color_albers() +
  labs(
    title = "Theme Lab preview",
    subtitle = "Tune family + preset + style, then copy YAML"
  )