Plots.jl: Change default theme

[daschw]

I wonder if we should switch to :wong (https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.1618?WT.ec_id=NMETH-201106) as the default color palette on Plots 1.0.

Current default

Wong

Other suggestions are also welcome. cc @BeastyBlacksmith @mkborregaard

[mkborregaard]

I don't feel strongly, except, of course, that this is massively breaking, so must come out before Plots 1.0.
I actually prefer the :Dark2 palette if we had to choose one, but there are many better than the current one is for sure.
(with https://github.com/JuliaPlots/PlotUtils.jl/pull/73)

[mkborregaard]

If we do change, maybe have a community vote on discourse?

[daschw]

That's a good idea!

[BeastyBlacksmith]

Personally, I don't like :wong. I would rather take :wong2. One point I pay attention to is the the default color of the first series. I don't think orange looks good on its own, :wong2 has black, which I think is good, but then it has yellow as second which is not very good to print on white.
I also like the inferno heatmap more than viridis, but maybe we should provide jet as default.
Defaults are so controversial ^^
Maybe we should compute colors that have good contrast to the background.

[daschw]

That's what's done with the current default theme.

[daschw]

Maybe we should just stick to the current defaults. Users can use PlotThemes and PLOTS_DEFAULTS anyway to tweak appearance to their taste. Starting a community vote would also mean that we probably have to further delay a release a couple of days.

[BeastyBlacksmith]

I'm fine with that

[mkborregaard]

I'm essetially fine with anything that doesn't involve taking the low-quality "jet" as a default :scream: Of course there are questions of taste, but there is also color perception theory and all the gradients in utils (essentially) follow that.
The default already computes colors for maximal difference from the background, at least it's supposed to.

I think asking widely could be fun and lead to some interesting discussions. The current palette really isn't very good IMHO.

[daschw]

The current palette really isn't very good IMHO.

Agreed. If you want to open up a vote on discourse, I'm also fine with that. I don't feel strongly about any theme - wong vs. dark2 or other suggestions - either.

[JackDevine]

My two cents:

I would prefer wong/wong2 over dark as the default theme.

On Jupytper notebooks, the dark theme sort of sticks out whether you have Jupyter lab theme set to dark or light. On the other hand, the wong theme (or any other theme with a white background) only sticks out when the Jupyter lab theme is set to dark. I really like the fact that when you plot in Jupyter notebooks, the plots look like they belong in the notebook. If your default had a non-white background, then some of the notebook flow would get lost in my opinion.

Also, plots with a white background tend to look much nicer in documents (publications, notes, etc...).

I really like the fact that dark themes are easy on your eyes for prolonged screen time or for working after sunset. However, having a color palette that reduces eye strain feels like more of an opt in thing since different people have different needs with regards to eye strain.

[isentropic]

I suggest implementing a new colorscheme based on http://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/index.html
I think seaborns pallet looks very good while resembling Wong

[mkborregaard]

@isentropic if you make a PR with that to PlotUtils (the colors) and incorporate in a PlotThemes theme we will merge it for sure (and it could join the competition to become the default). Looks really nice.

[mkborregaard]

@JackDevine I only meant the colorbrewer :Dark2 pallette, not the dark theme from PlotThemes. Agree with your points there.

[isentropic]

@mkborregaard Yes, I will try doing it, maybe this is the time to do my first PR to Plots instead of actively critisizing it

[isentropic]

Additionally, seaborn has a very neat feature of scaling the plots based on the context of plotting. See http://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/aesthetics.html#seaborn-figure-styles
Scaling plot elements

[isentropic]

Seaborn has many color palettes, many of them look very nice to me. Maybe someone has a better idea to incorporate all of them without creating new themes for each one

[daschw]

I think in the long term the better solution would be adding new palettes to https://github.com/JuliaGraphics/ColorSchemes.jl and we integrate this in Plots.

[daschw]

I agree that the seaborn qualitative palettes do look nice.

[mkborregaard]

I agree @daschw . I think we can shift to ColorSchemes without changing the user-facing interface right?

[daschw]

Yes, I think so too.

[isentropic]

I have added the default seaborn color theme (deep) along with all others it offers (PR sent to PlotThemes)

Here is what it looks like,

Plots.showtheme(:seaborn_deep)

Additional example:

theme(:seaborn_deep)
plot(Plots.fakedata(50,10), w=3)

I used matplotlibs viridis theme for gradient (afaik seaborn does not change this).

which I think looks better than the original I think:

[isentropic]

think in the long term the better solution would be adding new palettes to https://github.com/JuliaGraphics/ColorSchemes.jl and we integrate this in Plots

If needed I can send a PR with seaborn color palettes (similar to https://github.com/JuliaPlots/PlotThemes.jl/pull/48)

[isentropic]

While at this, would somebody also consider it a good idea to increase the default scale of the plots? By default, Plots' font is smaller compared to other plotting packages. I would personally much prefer if the default scale was higher.

It is easily illustrated with pyplot backend (but equally valid for others):

theme(:seaborn_deep)
plot(rand(10,3))

plot(rand(10,3), dpi = 130, margin=7mm)  # Althogh the customization is minimal here, this looks much better

For example, matplotlib pyplot's default dpi looks this,

plt.plot(rand(100))

Gnuplot also follows a higher scale:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gnuplot_diagrams

base R plotting also uses a somewhat higher font scale
https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/13-scatter-plot.html

On a personal side, I very much like what Plots.jl already is, but I think that we can make better-looking defaults (for most users). Back when I started doing Julia I was repelled by default plot style parameters of Plots and could not get to use it because of it. Now I use it because I learned to make it look like I want to.

[isentropic]

I would love to contribute but I am struggling to at least reproduce upscaling with GR() backend. I could perhaps present more examples and common use cases with this proposed by me new default theme if you would like it.

[mkborregaard]

You could open a new issue on Plots if you like, but I'd personally prefer keeping the current settings.

[mkborregaard]

I think we could also make PlotThemes a lot more visible in the docs. I think that would help new users see that they can get it like they want. @isentropic @daschw another option could be to have different style defaults (font sizes, line widths, frame styles etc) in PlotThemes as well, rather than just colors? That's the design I'm going for in MakieThemes.

[daschw]

Sure, I think ideally themes like wong should not even be a theme. It's just the default theme with a different color palette. If our color palette support would be better (JuliaPlots/PlotUtils.jl#73) we would not need wong, dark2, seaborn themes in PlotThemes.

[asinghvi17]

It's pretty easy to avoid too much breakage by reordering the Wong colormap. Here, the top is the reordered Wong, and the second, third and fourth rows represent its transformation to protanopic, deuteranopic and tritanopic color space.

[isentropic]

I think we could also make PlotThemes a lot more visible in the docs. I think that would help new users see that they can get it like they want. @isentropic @daschw another option could be to have different style defaults (font sizes, line widths, frame styles etc) in PlotThemes as well, rather than just colors? That's the design I'm going for in MakieThemes.

I could help with this if there are some specific things you want. If it is something along the lines of creating a page for theming in https://github.com/JuliaPlots/PlotDocs.jl/tree/master/docs/src I can definitely help.

[drbenvincent]

Can we get the default tick direction to be out? That would make a big difference, and be much less Matlab-like and more like Python/Matplotlib and R

[mkborregaard]

I think that's another argument for allowing more styling options here in PlotThemes. I'm starting to realise the Pandora's box of different people's preferences is opened once you talk about tinkering with defaults. In conclusion I think we should decide to stick with the current defaults.

Both, are you aware you can set your own defaults using the config/startup.jl file? @daschw we didn't deprecate this, did we?

[mkborregaard]

@isentropic yes, that would be awesome

[daschw]

No, we did not. It's a tip in http://docs.juliaplots.org/latest/install/ We should update .juliarc.jl to .julia/config/startup.jl though.
´

[drbenvincent]

Both, are you aware you can set your own defaults using the config/startup.jl file? @daschw we didn't deprecate this, did we?

I didn't know this. I'm relatively new to Julia, so feeling my way. Will look into it.

[ssfrr]

:+1: to changing the default color scheme. I think particularly with filled areas the current one doesn't look great to me. I get that it's hard to get everyone to agree on the best default, but it seems like there are options that everyone would probably agree are better than the current default (though maybe I'm being optimistic). I actually thought the current default colorscheme was designed to be the Julia colors - is it not?

Current default colors:

wong:

[isentropic]

@isentropic yes, that would be awesome

Now that I thought about it, could we somehow include https://github.com/JuliaPlots/PlotThemes.jl Readme.md file as a section in Plots.jl documentation?

[asinghvi17]

Yes, if we depend on PlotThemes in PlotDocs, we can copy its README.

[isentropic]

Is it perhaps possible to somehow include https://github.com/JuliaPlots/PlotThemes.jl/blob/master/README.md directly into PlotDocs? I've never used documenter personally, but instead of making copies each time PlotThemes updates, maybe there is a direct way of inclusion?

[mkborregaard]

Yes there is a way of doing that but I'm not a documenter shark either. Anshul should be the expert here though

[mkborregaard]

@ssfrr no the default theme is simply (more or less) the result of Colors.distinguishable_colors when you start with :steelblue.

[asinghvi17]

You can't include it directly, but you can automate it, as I've done for GeoMakie (same principle, at least) here: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/GeoMakie.jl/blob/4f79946a615db5fcb27c849a42a4a67ea89c60d8/docs/make.jl#L4

Ignore the stuff after that line, I had to remove some HTML 😁

[isentropic]

But how would I copy the readme from another repo?

You can't include it directly, but you can automate it, as I've done for GeoMakie (same principle, at least) here: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/GeoMakie.jl/blob/4f79946a615db5fcb27c849a42a4a67ea89c60d8/docs/make.jl#L4

Ignore the stuff after that line, I had to remove some HTML grin

[asinghvi17]

If we depend on PlotThemes in the docs,

using PlotThemes
cp(joinpath(dirname(pathof(PlotThemes)), "..", "README.md"), joinpath(@__DIR__, "src", "plotthemes.md"); force = true)

should do it.

[asinghvi17]

Ah, I forgot I already had a PR up for that: http://docs.juliaplots.org/previews/PR181/plotthemes/

[isentropic]

While this discussion is still on, perhaps Plots could use a new logo? Maybe something along these lines?

[daschw]

I like it, simple and julian. Personally, I don't mind dropping the batman logo, not sure how others see that.

[mkborregaard]

Yeah why not, though it feels subtly wrong to have a logo not made by @cormullion :-)

[cormullion]

(i love seeing other people do logos...) I really like the upper half of isentropic's logo (but not the the "julia" font).

[BeastyBlacksmith]

we should also make it less Plots specific, if it is going to be used for the JuliaPlots organisation.

[daschw]

I think this would be a Plots logo, not a JuliaPlots org logo - both would be nice to have.

[mkborregaard]

The part without the Plots.jl is not Plots specific though

[cormullion]

What you could do is have some kind of overarching family design, then use individual graphics for various packages... Here's a sketch of the idea:

[isentropic]

So I drew some more possible logos, but a logo for JuliaPlots is difficult to come up with
Maybe choose one for each sub organization?

Or, use these for as one logo as @cormullion suggested?

Top left is still my preference, as it is the most basic plot.
Top right suggests some statistical connection
Bottom left is like analog signal
Bottom right is closer to some pdfs

Maybe have a vote on possible logos?

I think JuliaPlots and Plots.jl should have one logo (as currently is). As Plots is still the main repo

[JackDevine]

These logos are looking fabulous.

It will be sad to see the batman logo go, since I am a big fan of it, although I think that the ideas being proposed here do look a lot more professional. Bear in mind that the original selling point for the batman logo was that it could be generated by Plots.jl itself. Is there any scope for the current logos to be generated by Plots.jl?

Top left is still my preference, as it is the most basic plot.

This is my preference too, using circles drives the Julia logo pun home quite clearly.

Is it possible for you to have the coloured lines in bottom left infront of the black axes? That is how Plots.jl works by default.

I think JuliaPlots and Plots.jl should have one logo (as currently is). As Plots is still the main repo

Plots.jl is the original repo, but in the future Makie (or something completely different) could become the "main" repo. Whatever we do, I think that we should go with something simple that emphasizes the cohesion of all of the major packages.

[isentropic]

I thought it about it too, but it does not look as well (I think)

I think, for now, it would be okay for JuliaPlots to share the logo with Plots. If another package becomes the main way to go (Makie?), Plots.jl can just retain the logo (for historical reasons).

[mkborregaard]

Makie already has a really great logo - no need to tamper with that

[mkborregaard]

Maybe use the top left logo for the organisation, and let Plots itself keep the batman logo?

[mkborregaard]

@SimonDanisch (the above ~10 comments)

[SimonDanisch]

I like for JuliaPlots:

Although the arrows go out the square a bit far for a logo, that will be displayed in a very small square ;)

[mkborregaard]

Yes what resolution will it be displayed in? I find it unlikely we could pick out anything if all 4 subplots were included

[SimonDanisch]

Ah I actually meant only one..Somehow thought they were 4 pictures I could link separately :D

[cormullion]

So many good ideas are discarded when you look at a 128x128 github icon. 😂

[mkborregaard]

Nice I agree (with both :-) )

[isentropic]

@SimonDanisch

Although the arrows go out the square a bit far for a logo, that will be displayed in a very small square ;)

I can't understand what do you mean exactly? Do you mean, perhaps, arrow heads are too large?

[isentropic]

I sent a PR https://github.com/JuliaPlots/PlotDocs.jl/pull/182 with the logo. Let me know if there need be any changes.

[isentropic]

Thanks to @daschw now that colorschemes is in plotutils, should we perhaps rethink the default colorscheme?

[daschw]

No, I think we had a chance for this with the release of 1.0. We should not make such a breaking change now.
However, choosing a different color palette is as easy as plot(rand(10, 4), palette = :Dark2) now.

[BeastyBlacksmith]

So I think its fine to close now, with the decision of not changing the default theme until 2.0.
And as a side goodie JuliaPlots has a new logo now :) Thanks @isentropic .