There are some alternatives with pretty defaults - I personally love seaborn [1] which builds on top of matplotlib, but seaborn is even more "do it the way I like it or suffer the consequences" - however, the coming v2.0 of Matplotlib comes with a few API changes and a different default color scheme: http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html or http://matplotlib.1069221.n5.nabble.com/matplotlib-v2-0-0b1-...
[1] http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/examples/index...