Defining plot line styles, properties, and format strings

This recipe shows how we can change various line properties such as styles, colors, or width. Having lines set up appropriately according to the information presented and distinct enough for target audiences (if the audience is a younger population, we may want to target them with more vivid colors; if they are older, we may want to use more contrasting colors) can make the difference between being barely noticeable and leaving a great impact on the viewer.

Getting ready

Although we stressed how important it is to aesthetically tune your presentation, we first must learn how to do it.

If you don't have a particular eye for color matching, there are free and commercial online tools that can generate color sets for you. One of the most well known is Colorbrewer2, which can be found at http://colorbrewer2.org/.

Some serious research has been conducted on the usage of color in data visualizations, but explaining that theory is out of the...