Instantly Beautify Matplotlib Plots by Viewing all Available Styles

In this post, you’ll learn about the different available matplotlib styles that can instantly change the appearance of the plot. Let’s begin by making a simple line plot using the default style. This simple style is often the first (and sometimes only) style that many people encounter with matplotlib not realizing how easy it is to choose others.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

x = np.arange(-2, 8, .1)
y = .1 * x ** 3 - x ** 2 + 3 * x + 2

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(4.5, 3), dpi=100)
ax.plot(x, y)
ax.set_title('Default Matplotlib Style');

Viewing all of the available styles

There are nearly 30 builtin styles to matplotlib that can be activated with the plt.style.use function. The style names are available in the plt.style.available list. In the following code, we iterate through all of the available styles, then make the same line plot as above, setting the style temporarily for each Axes with plt.style.context.

fig = plt.figure(dpi=100, figsize=(10, 20), tight_layout=True)
available = ['default'] + plt.style.available
for i, style in enumerate(available):
    with plt.style.context(style):
        ax = fig.add_subplot(10, 3, i + 1)
        ax.plot(x, y)
    ax.set_title(style)