Color is an essential element in any visual. It can have a huge impact on how graphics are perceived. For example, sharp color contrast can be used to highlight a focus; a combination of several distinct colors is useful in setting up a hierarchy.

In Matplotlib 2, colors have been set by default to better differentiate between categories; and to perceive continuous numerical values more intuitively, yet we often need better control over the colors to represent our data. In this section, we will introduce the common color options in Matplotlib.