Call for new style defaults

Hello all,

Following much discussion, we are changing the default color map and styles in the upcoming 2.0 release!

The new default color map will be ‘viridis’ (aka option D). I recommend everyone watch Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt’s talk from SciPy2015 introducing the new color map and providing an introduction to the math of color perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU

We are soliciting proposals to change any and all other visual defaults (including adding new rcParams as needed).

If you have a proposal please create a PR or issue with the changes to rcsetup.py and matplotlibrc.template implementing the changes by August 9, 2015 (1 month from now). Do not worry about updating any failing tests.

At the end, Micheal Droettboom and I will decide on the new defaults.

A ‘classic’ style will be provided so reverting to the current default values will be a single line of python (mpl.style.use('classic')).

Please distribute this as widely as possible. We only want to do this once and want to get feedback from as many users as possible.

Thomas Caswell

PS jet is harmful to you and those around you

See https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/4622 for an example proposal PR.