I've been poking around with R graphical parameters trying to make my plots look a little more professional (e.g., las=1, bty="n" usually help). But not quite there. Started playing with tikzDevice. A huge improvement! Amazing how much better things look when the font sizes and styles in the figure match those of the surrounding document. Still, not quite there. What I'm ultimately looking for are those professional gradient shading, rounded corners, and shadow effects found in MS Excel plots. I know they're probably considered chart junk, but I like them. They're just nice looking.

Q: How can I get these effects into my R plots? Do people usually just export to Inkscape and doodle over there? It would be nice if there were a literate programming approach. Is there an R package that handles these effects outright?