Remove Legend Title from ggplot2 Plot in R (Example)

In this R post you’ll learn how to delete a legend title in a ggplot2 plot.

The content looks as follows:

• Example Data
• Example: Create ggplot2 Scatterplot without Legend Title
• Video, Further Resources & Summary

Let’s jump right to the examples.

Example Data

In the example of this tutorial, we’ll use the following data frame as basement:

set.seed(864)                                       # Create random data
data <- data.frame(x = rnorm(100),
                   y = rnorm(100),
                   group = c(rep("A", 50), rep("B", 50)))

Furthermore, we need to install and load the ggplot2 package to RStudio:

install.packages("ggplot2")                         # Install and load ggplot2
library("ggplot2")

Now, we can draw a plot based on the functions of the ggplot2 package as shown below:

ggp <- ggplot(data, aes(x, y, col = group)) +       # Create default ggplot2
  geom_point()
ggp                                                 # Print plot

Figure 1: ggplot2 Plot with Legend Title.

Figure 1 shows the graph that we have created with the previous R code. It’s a scatterplot representing two data groups. On the right side of the plot, you can see a legend and a legend title.

Example: Create ggplot2 Scatterplot without Legend Title

In case we want to remove a legend title from a ggplot2 graphic, we can use the theme function and the legend.title argument. Have a look at the following R syntax and the resulting image:

ggp +                                               # Remove legend title
  theme(legend.title = element_blank())

Figure 2: ggplot2 Plot without Legend Title.

As you can see in Figure 2, we deleted the legend title from our graph.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Do you need more explanations on the R codes of this article? Then I can recommend to watch the following video of my YouTube channel. I’m illustrating the topics of this tutorial in the video:

In addition, you might read some of the related articles of this website:

• Change Legend Title in ggplot2
• Add Common Legend to Combined ggplot2 Plots
• Create Legend in ggplot2 Plot
• R Graphics Gallery
• The R Programming Language

You learned in this tutorial how to delete the heading of a ggplot legend in the R programming language. If you have further questions, let me know in the comments.