"An illustration software: I personally prefer Inkscape, but the industry standard Adobe Illustrator or newcomer Sketch are just as good. Use it to post-process your plots and graphs; it’s often much easier than writing plotting directives in Matlab or matplotlib."

Is this good advice? We generate a TON of graphs and charts in academia, and treating them like "design" objects seems to be a lot of work. Worth it? What is industry standard practice for good looking data viz?