Example of how to thicken the lines around your plot (axes lines) and to get big bold fonts on the tick and axis labels.
1 from pylab import *
2
3 # Thicken the axes lines and labels
4 #
5 # Comment by J. R. Lu:
6 # I couldn't figure out a way to do this on the
7 # individual plot and have it work with all backends
8 # and in interactive mode. So, used rc instead.
9 #
10 rc('axes', linewidth=2)
11
12 # Make a dummy plot
13 plot([0, 1], [0, 1])
14
15 # Change size and font of tick labels
16 # Again, this doesn't work in interactive mode.
17 fontsize = 14
18 ax = gca()
19
20 for tick in ax.xaxis.get_major_ticks():
21 tick.label1.set_fontsize(fontsize)
22 tick.label1.set_fontweight('bold')
23 for tick in ax.yaxis.get_major_ticks():
24 tick.label1.set_fontsize(fontsize)
25 tick.label1.set_fontweight('bold')
26
27 xlabel('X Axis', fontsize=16, fontweight='bold')
28 ylabel('Y Axis', fontsize=16, fontweight='bold')
29
30 # Save figure
31 savefig('thick_axes.png')
thick_axes.png