Using Matplotlib to get XKCD-style Plots

This past week, I found another developer blog where a post caught my attention: Pythonic Perambulations.  More specifically, it was this post regarding presenting data in an “xkcd” style.  I figured I’d give this blog post some inbound link props because I found the content both useful and amusing.  The author seems to have gotten quite a bit of well-deserved praise already in his blog’s comments section.

Readers of xkcd are often shown very interesting plots illustrating a humorous point or interesting concept.  In any serious data analysis project, often there are many iterations of sifting and sorting through data until a some hypothesis is rejected or accepted.  Rather than put a disclaimer to warn against drawing serious conclusions from a rough-draft grade presentation, I may just start xkcdifying things.  If nothing else, xkcd-ifying plots may take the sting out of any data-driven negative implications.  🙂