Awesome presentation from Jonathan Corum, who is a total master of his craft!
I had a nice little convo with Nathan Yau (of flowingdata.com, which is one of my favourite viz sites) about this ~a year or so back. Alas, it was in a "Members Only" tutorial about using Illustrator with R, so I'm screenshotting it below for proof…but for accessibility's sake, the gist:
- I've used illustrator to clean things up when it's a visualization/graphic that's meant for print/static and has nothing to do with research and/or data that will change.
- I only hand edit things that aren't visual encodings (Nathan says this same thing, mapping visual elements to data is done in R).
- I do this as little as possible — both because it's not reproducible, and because I'm not great with illustrator (I happen to own Adobe CS6, but I maintain that the skills involved in truly knowing Illustrator/Photoshop are akin to knowing another programming language. I can do one thing well in PhotoShop – make gifs – and even that involves a workflow I've honed over time).
- Hand editing is super time consuming, and only worth it (IMHO) if you have a specific medium in mind (e.g. a journal article, or The New York Times print edition, in Jonathan's case).
Edit: Link to hanpuku, which links Illustrator and d3.js through some wizardry I don't totally understand, but I bet someone better with either of those tools could!