I just ran across chartsnthings (h/t to Gelman). Kevin Quealy at the New York Times graphics department shows the progression from initial sketch to final graphic.

Thoughts:

1) I love seeing other people's first sketches. I sketch first too, and I find that the quality of any graphic can mostly be determined by how good the idea was when I first sketched it.

2) This reminded me that rather than using R to make my final figures, I really need run them through Illustrator. Nathan Yau's book Visualize This gives some awesome worked examples of how to clean up R graphics in Illustrator. (And for Harvard folks, the book is available online through Widener library!).

Posted by Richard Nielsen at May 12, 2012 10:58 PM