Coming of Age: R and Spatial Data Visualisation by James Cheshire.
From the post:
I have been using R (a free statistics and graphics software package) now for the past four years or so and I have seen it become an increasingly powerful method of both analysing and visualising spatial data. Crucially, more and more people are writing accessible tutorials (see here) for beginners and intermediate users and the development of packages such as ggplot2 have made it simpler than ever to produce fantastic graphics. You don’t get the interactivity you would with conventional GIS software such as ArcGIS when you produce the visualisation but you are much more flexible in terms of the combinations of plot types and the ease with which they can be combined. It is, for example, time consuming to produce multivariate symbols (such as those varying in size and colour) in ArcGIS but with R it is as simple* as one line of code. I have, for example, been able to add subtle transitions in the lines of the migration map above. Unless you have massive files, plotting happens quickly and can be easily saved to vector formats for tweaking in a graphics package.
Truly impressive visualization work.
Take it as encouragement to go out and do likewise.