From sketch to graphic 

 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!).