"In this talk, I am going to expand on my NormConf Lightning Talk “How to stop crying when using Matplotlib”. Matplotlib is my tool of choice for custom data visualizations and I have been teaching it for the last 2 years in a dedicated course at HSLU. It is an extremely popular data visualization library among the Python data science community and often the only one that can produce fully customized, complex visualizations. However, due to its long history, API changes and lack of good educational resources, many people struggle to harness all its capabilities, ending up frustrated, dissatisfied and with an ugly chart as an output. I’m going to explain why Matplotlib works the way it works and how to work with it instead of against it. I will also show some tips and tricks for writing sustainable code and and share a few recipes for making beautiful, complex data visualizations. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.