Making nicer matplotlib figures with prettyplotlib

matplotlib is sometimes criticized for the default appearance of its figures. For example, the default color maps are neither aesthetically appealing nor do they present perceptually clear information.

There are many attempts to circumvent this problem. In this recipe, we will present prettyplotlib, created by Olga Botvinnik. This lightweight Python library considerably improves the default styling of many kinds of matplotlib figures.

Getting ready

You will find the installation instructions of prettyplotlib on the project's page at http://github.com/olgabot/prettyplotlib. You can basically just do pip install prettyplotlib in a terminal.

How to do it…

1. Let's first import NumPy and matplotlib:

   In [1]: import numpy as np
           import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
           import matplotlib as mpl
           %matplotlib inline

2. We then draw several curves with matplotlib:

   In [2]: np.random.seed(12)
           for i in range(8):
               x...