How to make matplotlib graphs look professionally done like this?

Question

Default matplotlib graphs look really unattractive and even unprofessional. I tried out couple of packages include seaborn as well as prettyplotlib but both of these just barely

Answer 1

To get closer to the style you prefer, you could use the whitegrid style in seaborn. As the other answers have noted, you control the transparency of the fill with the alpha parameter to fill_between.

import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sns.set_style("whitegrid")

blue, = sns.color_palette("muted", 1)

x = np.arange(23)
y = np.random.randint(8, 20, 23)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y, color=blue, lw=3)
ax.fill_between(x, 0, y, alpha=.3)
ax.set(xlim=(0, len(x) - 1), ylim=(0, None), xticks=x)

More information on seaborn styles can be found in the docs.