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Comment by v3gas | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool, but I actually prefer the standard style in matplotlib.

It really depends on why you're generating the graphs for. If you needed a visualization for a storytelling article, I really doubt you'd prefer matplotlib's bland standard style.

If you just want to visualize some data fast for yourself, then, yeah, the standard style is really great - it's readable and saves you time.

> I really doubt you'd prefer matplotlib's bland standard style (MBSS)

To be fair, MBSS got much better in the recent version 2.x

Before (version 1.x), I always had to use seaborn and/or modify parameters, but now the default style is good enough for most of my use cases.

Agree, the default style looks much better in 2.x. It's good enough for most use cases, but it's still quite far from publication level, IMO.

Yes, I agree! 1.x was pretty ugly

As someone who's moderately colorblind the color change is really helpful, so even for bland data visualizations it's actually better.

I agree – it's interesting how one is initially drawn to, yet eventually tires of these sorts of plot styles. While Seaborn strikes a good balance, clear and simple monochrome plots never go out of fashion. This is just as much the case when building fancy interactive plots using Shiny/Plotly etc.

Monochrome is problematic for plots with multiple series though, because people's eyes aren't good at distinguishing shades of gray. You can use dashed lines for stuff like line plots, but those don't work well for complex trends and you can only use one or two.

I think monochrome is great for some uses, but at least for the area I work in the majority of figures use color. I'd say the main reason to use monochrome is for print, but most scientific journals are online nowadays and even conference proceedings are handed out in color. Now that doesn't mean everybody uses color well but that's a different discussion...

Interesting, @bede @v3gas I would love to hear your thoughts on my plots -- http://abhirag.in/articles/price_data_present.html

Too fancy? Too plain? Kinda ok? Kinda new to matplotlib, so your feedback would help :)

Nice charts.

Just one idea, on your vegetable chart, you have onions as a red line and tomatoes as yellow. I would swap them around, as I automatically associate tomatoes with red.

Valid point :) I'll change the order of colors in my palette.

The plots are pretty nice. The serif font for the axes captions and the monospaced font for the axis labels are jarring.

Would you prefer I use serif for both or sans serif for both?

Sans-serif for both captions and labels. The serif font that is there right now is looking kinda out of place. Also the {braces} around the captions. Finally, the labels in the legend do not need to be all italicized.

I think they're nice! I like the monospaced font for the axes. Fwiw, I would remove the legend in the case of there being only one curve, especially since you have good titles.

Thanks, I'll fix that, I was so engrossed in making sure that legends are in the right place that I totally overlooked the fact that they are redundant for single curve plots.

I like them. :)

Thanks :)

It would be interesting to see a built-in plotting style that doesn't give patent lawyers the fits. The patent office still requires monochrome plots.

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