There are some points to go through before crafting a visualization. If your figure is meant to be part of an exploratory analysis for yourself only, you might not work so hard into details such as the font's family and size; the ugly default settings given by base R graphing are enough. On the other hand, if you wish to publish your figure, you may want to pay a great deal of attention to details.
No matter what tool you use, production-grade plots require a great deal of work.
Another question to ask is, what kind of data do you have at hand? How many variables do you wish to represent? Are they discrete or continuous? Is there an underlying logical ordering for them? If we are talking time series, data could make more ...
