We recently wanted to brand several of our plots for publication in the local press. I looked around and found a couple suggestions on how to add images to plots, but nothing that seemed modular or customizable. My colleague reccomended the relatively new Magick package, which provided all of the functionality I needed (plus a lot more). Here is a simple example along with the code to replicate it:

library(ggplot2) library(magick) library(here) # For making the script run without a wd library(magrittr) # For piping the logo # Make a simple plot and save it ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = class)) + geom_point() + ggtitle("Cars") + ggsave(filename = paste0(here("/"), last_plot()$labels$title, ".png"), width = 5, height = 4, dpi = 300) # Call back the plot plot <- image_read(paste0(here("/"), "Cars.png")) # And bring in a logo logo_raw <- image_read("http://hexb.in/hexagons/ggplot2.png") # Scale down the logo and give it a border and annotation # This is the cool part because you can do a lot to the image/logo before adding it logo <- logo_raw %>% image_scale("100") %>% image_background("grey", flatten = TRUE) %>% image_border("grey", "600x10") %>% image_annotate("Powered By R", color = "white", size = 30, location = "+10+50", gravity = "northeast") # Stack them on top of each other final_plot <- image_append(image_scale(c(plot, logo), "500"), stack = TRUE) # And overwrite the plot without a logo image_write(final_plot, paste0(here("/"), last_plot()$labels$title, ".png"))

You can see that this creates a logo centered on a grey background with an annotation originating in the northwest of the band. I wanted to put our logo on the bottom right, 538 style, so I added some superfulous canvas on the right of the png and then croped it to fit our plots with Magick. The point is, Magick is highly customizable and opens up a lot of options that were previously closed to all but the undaunted photoshoppers. Want Vincent Vega to point at your x-axis? Go for it! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and have a heart attack.