Branding Your Data Visualizations Using Matplotlib

Just as companies will only use certain shades of colors and types of shapes in their images to create a unique brand image. You too can create your own personalized brand of data visualizations using matplotlib. And, better yet! You can do it once and forget about it!

Matplotlib may not be as cool looking out of the box as some of the other libraries. But, it remains the most data visualization library most of us seem to use in our daily jupyter notebook projects. Fortunately, I’ve also found it to be the easiest library to fine-tune my visualizations into a completely unique style and “brand” image.

This is significant to me, as a data scientist, because I place a high degree of importance upon the presentation and interpertability of my data visualizations. And, I found myself in a situation where I was often in a rush when dealing with styling and formatting when it was left as the last step of a long project.

There are a couple ways to create your own style for matplotlib.pyplot. This first post will introduce the older way and the next post will introduce the new.

3 Steps to a New Look

2. Modify the copy and save it somewhere I can easily use in future projects.

3. Direct projects towards the copied and modified file within the first couple cells of a jupyter notebook so that all my plots will be using the customized options.

Here is the “out-of-the-box”, default, style matplotlib provides for jupyter notebook’s currently using inline magic.

After modifying a copy of matplolibrc

And, directing matplotlib towards your modified copy of matplotlibrc.

Your newly customized style is used. And, because the file is saved locally the customized style will work with different installs!

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for the new way to create a branded style with matplotlib.pyplot!

Related posts:

Value investing can often be cringy. While not normally the word associated with value investing, there has been a sullying of the term by self-appointed “investing gurus” offering hollow advice…