My quick and dirty trick is to set an alpha=0.8 to soften the default colors. It always looks better.
Here is where to get them on the file exchange. This really ought to just be folded into MATLAB proper releases somehow.
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/51986-p...
ax.set_axisbelow(True) ax.grid(True, alpha=0.3)