Prework

By Garrick Aden-Buie & Silvia Canelón

June 23, 2021

Welcome to the Professional, Polished, Presentable workshop! We look forward to meeting you.

This is an intermediate workshop designed for R learners already familiar with the xaringan package for building presentations. Before attending the workshop, please complete the following prework.

Get the materials

Reminder: Download the companion materials that will help you complete the exercises. The easiest way is to use usethis::use_course():

usethis::use_course(
  url = "presentable-user2021/materials",
  destdir = "/file/path/on/your/local/machine"
)

If you’re comfortable with git and GitHub, you can clone or fork the repo following the instructions there.

Bring a style guide

We will be using the xaringanthemer package to create a style sheet to match the style guide preferred or required by your organization, institution, or company.

Find your style guide

Ask the marketing department at your company for a branding guide or design guide. Typically these are posted on internal web pages. If you work with a large organization you may be able to find a style guide by searching online for your company or organization’s name plus the terms style, design, or branding guide.

Alternatively, you can find examples of style guides online. Choose one that matches your design aspirations.

Here are a few that we like:

GOV.UK Design System is excellent. Their Styles page is a great place to start.
The Urban Institute Data Visualization Style Guide provides solid design advice, especially for charts and graphs.
The U.S. Web Design System is a treasure trove of design advice and knowledge. Their page on Design tokens is a good place to start looking for color and typography recommendations.

Explore the style guide

Explore the style guide, asking yourself:

What colors does it use and in what contexts?
What fonts does it recommend for headings and body text?
- Does the guide recommend specific fonts for screens or the web?

Bring the guide with you

Have this style guide easily available during the workshop so you can refer to it as needed.

Review markdown

Please complete this 10-minute interactive tutorial on Markdown.

Review xaringan

Please review the xaringan package documentation and/or xaringan chapter of the R Markdown book.

Pick a browser

These days, most browsers are great at rendering HTML. It turns out that they are also full of tools to help you develop for the web. That said, we’ll use either Firefox or Chrome and we recommend you do the same, if only for our tutorial. If for any reason you need to use Safari or Edge, please take a minute to learn how to access the developer tools.

Set up RStudio Cloud

We want you to be able to work from your own computer and preferred IDE in this workshop, but Cloud is an important back-up plan should you run into troubles.

Sign up for a free RStudio Cloud account at https://rstudio.cloud/ before the workshop. We recommend logging in with an existing Google or GitHub account, if you have one (rather than creating a new account with another password you have to remember).

Installations

Please bring a computer that has the following installed:

A recent version of R (>=3.6.0), which is available for free at https://cloud.r-project.org/
A recent version of RStudio Desktop (>=1.4), available for free ( RStudio Desktop Open Source License). Read up on the features of the latest version.
The R packages we will use:

Installation R Script

# Core Packages -----------------------------------------------------------
install.packages(c("xaringan", "metathis"))
install.packages("xaringanthemer", dependencies = TRUE)


# Extra Packages ----------------------------------------------------------
install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("gadenbuie/xaringanExtra")

install.packages("fontawesome")