I completely forgot that I was playing with named colors a long time ago, but I never got a script cleaned up enough for submission as an example. I was pretty happy with the output from this script, but the code is way to messy for an example:

https://gist.github.com/tonysyu/8929788

Maybe you can take some of the ideas in my old script and clean it up. I like the clarity of your example code much better than mine, but I think the output in the linked script is a bit easier to read.

We might like to put a black border around the colours so that the light ones stand out against a black background.

@tonysyu I like your arrangement.
To keep it simple, I did just a three column arrangement, but without sections.... I'm not convinced yet.
The black border around lines is not constant, depending on the window size, I don't know how to keep it stable.

This looks great: The layout is nice and the code is much easier to read than my original example.

Could you add a docstring for the file describing the purpose of this example? I know it seems self-evident, but it's still helpful for someone browsing examples:

https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/wiki/MEP12#wiki-clean-up-guidelines

Added the docstring, Is this enough for a description or is something more needed?

all the items() calls should probably be six-ified and the future-proofing imports added to the top.

@tacaswell I am not sure what you were refering to with "future-proofing" I added the typical

from __future__ import (absolute_import, division, print_function,
                        unicode_literals)

the __future__ imports is what I meant.

👍 from me.

👍