Drastically Beautifying Visualizations With One Line: Styling Plots
Making appealing plots was never so easy
The most underestimated part of a visualization is its color palette — too often do visualizers spend lots of time adding ticks and annotations but forgo choosing a fitting palette. Color is one of the most informative signals we use to interact with the world; a plot with a bad choice of color and design — even if it has all the bells and whistles — will be received with much less enthusiasm and interest than a simple plot with good styling.
Take a look for yourself: which plot would you rather be presented with?
Most people would prefer the chart to the right — and the good news is, it took one line of code to transform the (frankly, ugly) default plotting to a much more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing styling.
FiveThirtyEight
FiveThirtyEight, whose name comes from the number of electors in the United States electoral college (538), is a website specializing in opinion poll analysis in politics, economics, and sports. Created by Nate Silver, its visualizations are particularly…
