Announcement

Thank you to everyone who has used prettyplotlib and made it what it is today! Unfortunately, I no longer have the bandwidth to maintain prettyplotlib. I recommend using seaborn. Using seaborn, to get the prettyplotlib style, do:

import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style='ticks', palette='Set2')

And to remove "chartjunk", do:

sns.despine()

If you have discrete pull requests, I will accept them, but I personally will no longer fix bugs.

If you are a biological scientist looking for ways to analyze your big-ish (20+ samples) data, check out my main project, flotilla.

prettyplotlib

Python matplotlib-enhancer library which painlessly creates beautiful default matplotlib plots. Inspired by Edward Tufte's work on information design and Cynthia Brewer's work on color perception.

I truly believe that scientific progress is impeded when improper data visualizations are used. I spent a lot of time tweaking my figures to make them more understandable, and realized the scientific world could be a better place if the default parameters for plotting libraries followed recent advances in information design research. And thus prettyplotlib was born.

Requirements:

matplotlib. Can be installed via pip install matplotlib or easy_install matplotlib
brewer2mpl. Can be installed via pip install brewer2mpl or easy_install brewer2mpl

Comparison to `matplotlib`

`matplotlib` default `plot`	`prettyplotlib` default `plot`
`matplotlib` default `scatter`	`prettyplotlib` default `scatter`
`matplotlib` default `bar`	`prettyplotlib` default `bar`
`matplotlib` default `hist`	`prettyplotlib` default `hist`
`matplotlib` default `hist` with grid	`prettyplotlib` default `hist` with grid
`matplotlib` default `boxplot`	`prettyplotlib` default `boxplot`
`matplotlib` default `pcolormesh` positive and negative data	`prettyplotlib` default `pcolormesh` positive and negative data
`matplotlib` default `pcolormesh` positive data only	`prettyplotlib` default `pcolormesh` positive data only
`matplotlib pcolormesh` negative-valued data with labels	`prettyplotlib pcolormesh` negative-valued data with labels