You want to use premade themes to control the overall plot appearance.

To use a premade theme, add theme_bw() or theme_grey() (Figure 9-5):

library(gcookbook) # For the data set

# Base plot
p <- ggplot(heightweight, aes(x=ageYear, y=heightIn)) + geom_point()

# Grey theme (the default)
p + theme_grey()

# Black-and-white theme
p + theme_bw()

Figure 9-5. Left: scatter plot with theme_grey() (the default); right: with theme_bw()

Some commonly used properties of theme elements in ggplot2 are those things that are controlled by theme(). Most of these things, like the title, legend, and axes, are outside the plot area, but some of them are inside the plot area, such as grid lines and the background coloring.