- Named colors, hex codes
#1f77b4, RGB tuples
- Color psychology: blue = trust, green = growth, red = loss
- Colorblind-friendly palettes (IBM: blue, orange, purple)
- Conditional colors for profit/loss bar charts
- Specific titles: who, what, when — avoid "Sales Chart"
- Always include units: Revenue ($M), Market Share (%)
- Title hierarchy: 14–16 pt bold > axis labels 12 pt
- Subtitles via
ax.text() for regional or date context
- Required whenever multiple series share an axis
- Placement:
loc='best', or bbox_to_anchor outside plot
- Styling:
shadow, fancybox, title, ncol
- Multi-column layout for 4+ series to save vertical space
- Global defaults via
plt.rcParams['font.family']
- Recommended: Arial, Helvetica, DejaVu Sans
- Properties:
fontweight, fontstyle, color
- Hierarchy: title 16 pt › axis labels 12 pt › ticks 10 pt › annotations 9 pt
FuncFormatter: display $1.5M, 85K, 15% on axesStrMethodFormatter('{x:,.0f}') for thousand separatorsPercentFormatter for ratio/proportion axes- Tick control:
set_xticks, MaxNLocator, label rotation
- Part A Revenue vs. Target dual-line chart (30 pts)
- Part B Regional sales horizontal bar chart (30 pts)
- Part C Product line multi-series comparison (25 pts)
- Part D Conditional profit margin bars (15 pts)