TIL you could make xkcd-like plots with matplotlib

I've used this for documenting concepts where I don't want people getting bogged down in trying to glean precise relationships from the plots, just general ideas. People have also commented that it made some deeply technical documentation more approachable because it felt less formal.

Fun plot style, but the "noise" is too regular to really look right. Seems like like it basically just superimposes a sine wave onto all the straight lines.

Compare the axes of the plots, or the vertical lines on the bar chart which have a pretty distinct periodicity, to the original: https://xkcd.com/373/

Shameless plug but this is exactly how I put together the graphs in my blog post[0]. It's very easy to use and surprisingly versatile although I did add a bit of photoshopping to get things exactly as I wanted them.

[0] https://summer.ai/blog ChatGPT should be your first cofounder

While I'm not a fan of the plot style, I use the xkcd colors from matplotlib.colors.XKCD_COLORS all the time. 954 colors named from the xkcd color survey [0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/

Related:

Xkcd-Style Plots in Matplotlib https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-i... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19293129)

XKCD Plots in Matplotlib: Going the Whole Way https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/07/10/XKCD-plots-in-matp... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11642344)

There is also an R package to do the same thing as a ggplot theme: https://xkcd.r-forge.r-project.org/

is that how he does it? I wouldn't be surprised.

import antigravity