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6 simple tips for prettier and

customised plots in Seaborn
206

(Python)
Beginner’s guide to easily personalise your plots

Zolzaya Luvsandorj Oct 6 · 6 min read

In this post, we will look at simple ways to customise your plots to make
them aesthetically more pleasing. I hope these simple tricks will help you
get better-looking plots and save you time from adjusting individual plots.

Photo by Kelli Tungay on Unsplash

Baseline plot
The scripts in this post are tested in Python 3.8.3 in Jupyter Notebook.

Let’s use Seaborn’s built-in dataset on penguins as our sample data:

# Import packages
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# Import data
df = sns.load_dataset('penguins').rename(columns={'sex': 'gender'})
df

We will build a standard scatter plot with the default chart settings to use it
as our baseline:

# Plot
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender')

We will see the journey of how this plot alters with each tip.

Tips
You will see that the Crst two tips are for individual plots whereas the
remaining four tips are for changing the default settings for all charts.

Tip #1: Semicolon

Did you notice the text output right above the chart in the previous plot? A
simple way to suppress this text output is to use ; at the end of your plot.

# Plot
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender');

By only adding ; at the end of our code, we get a cleaner output.

Tip #2: plt.figure()

Plots can often beneCt from resizing. If we wanted to resize, this is how we
would do it:

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(9, 5))
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender');

When we resized, the legend moved to the upper left corner. Let’s move the
legend outside the chart so that it doesn’t accidentally cover data points:

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(9, 5))
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender')
plt.legend(loc='upper right', bbox_to_anchor=(1.2, 1));

If you are wondering how to know what number combinations to use for
figsize() or bbox_to_anchor() , you will need to trial and error which

numbers work best for the plot.

Tip #3: sns.set_style()

This function helps to change the overall style of the plots if we don’t like
the default style. This includes things like the aesthetics of the axis colours
and background. Let’s change the style to whitegrid and see how the plot
appearance changes:

# Change default style

sns.set_style('whitegrid')

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(9, 5))
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender')
plt.legend(loc='upper right', bbox_to_anchor=(1.2, 1));

Here are some more other options to try out: 'darkgrid' , 'dark' and
'ticks' to Cnd the one you fancy more.

Tip #4: sns.set_context()

The label sizes look quite small in the previous plot. With
sns.set_context() , we could change the context parameters if we don’t like

the default settings. I use this function mainly to control the default font
size for labels in the plots. By changing the default, we can save time from
not having to tweak the font size for diNerent elements (e.g. axis label, title,
legend) of individual plots. Let’s change the context to 'talk' and look at
the plot again:

# Change default context

sns.set_context('talk')

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(9, 5))
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender')
plt.legend(loc='upper right', bbox_to_anchor=(1.3, 1));

It’s more easily legible, isn’t it? Another option to try out is: 'poster' which
will increase the default size even more.

Tip #5: sns.set_palette()

If you ever want to customise the default colour palette to your preferred
colour combinations, this function comes in handy. We can use colourmaps
from Matplotlib. Here are the lists of Matplotlib colourmaps to choose from.
Let’s change the palette to 'rainbow' and look at the plot again:

# Change default palette

sns.set_palette('rainbow')

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(9, 5))
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender')
plt.legend(loc='upper right', bbox_to_anchor=(1.3, 1));

If you can’t Cnd a Matplotlib colourmap that you like, you can hand pick
colours to create your own unique colour palette. One way to create your
own palette is to pass a list of colour names to the function like in the
example below. Here is the list of colour names.

# Change default palette

sns.set_palette(['green', 'purple', 'red'])

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(9, 5))
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender')
plt.legend(loc='upper right', bbox_to_anchor=(1.3, 1));

If the colour names don’t quite capture what you are after, you can build
your own palette using hexadecimal colours to access a wider range of
options (over 16 million colours!). Here’s my favourite resource to Cnd a
custom colour palette in hexadecimal. Let’s see an example:

# Change default palette

sns.set_palette(['#62C370', '#FFD166', '#EF476F'])

# Plot
plt.figure(figsize=(9, 5))
sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='body_mass_g', y='bill_length_mm',
alpha=0.7, hue='species', size='gender')
plt.legend(loc='upper right', bbox_to_anchor=(1.3, 1));

Tip #6: sns.set()

From the previous three tips, I hope you will Cnd your favourite
combination (in some cases, it could be leaving the default as is). If we were
to update chart default settings, it’s better to do it just after importing the
visualisation packages. This means we will have a snippet like this at the
beginning of our scripts:

# Import packages
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# Change defaults
sns.set_style('whitegrid')
sns.set_context('talk')
sns.set_palette('rainbow')

Updating multiple defaults like above can be done more succinctly with
sns.set() . Here’s the succinct version of the same code:

# Import packages
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# Change defaults
sns.set(style='whitegrid', context='talk', palette='rainbow')

Voila These were the six tips. These are the comparison of the plots
before and after tweaking:

I hope you learned a few easy ways to tweak your plots without having to
spend too much time. I hope this post has given you starter ideas to begin
personalising your plots and make them more visually pleasing. If you are
interested, here are links to some of my posts:

Exploratory text analysis in Python

5 tips for pandas users
5 tips for data aggregation in pandas
Writing 5 common SQL queries in pandas
Writing advanced SQL queries in pandas

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206 1

Data Visualization Data Science Python Seaborn Matplotlib

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