Cleaning up a Python data visualization in Adobe Illustrator (pandas to ai2html)

How to take a data viz from Python (matplotlib/pandas/ggplot/plotnine) and clean it up in Illustrator. This isn't a real how-Illustrator-works tutorial – it's more of a view about how visual data journalists or graphics desks use Illustrator – but we'll touch on selection tools, artboards, font sizes, swatches, annotations, and more.

And yes, I know I could use v and groups and all sorts of shortcut keys to make this more effective and efficient, but they're tough to use in a video for Illustrator newbies! I highly recommend you get into using shortcut keys, though, as they'll easily cut your edit time in half.

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LINKS

Previous video about exporting from Python and using ai2html:    • Python to Adobe Illustrator to ai2html dat...  
Fixing font issues in ai2html: https://gist.github.com/jsoma/631621e...
ai2html walkthrough repo: https://github.com/jsoma/ai2html-walk...
Text shadows and glowing text in ai2html: https://github.com/jsoma/ai2html-walk...

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CHAPTERS

00:00 Intro
00:55 Opening the file
01:34 Window setup
02:25 Black and white arrows (selection tools)
03:29 Groups and ungrouping
06:34 Deleting things we don't want
07:32 Artboards and export size
10:18 Removing the background
11:03 Cleaning up text
13:19 Deleting more things
14:19 Setting up the vertical axis
18:18 Aligning text with other text
20:54 Aligning text with objects
23:30 Deleting with Select Same Appearance
24:18 Resizing with Transform Each
26:24 Swatches and changing colors with Select Same Fill
29:07 Resizing the entire graphic, fixing font sizes after resizing
30:28 Grouping objects for easy moving
31:15 Creating our legend items
34:25 Spacing our legend items
36:04 Highlighting a section of the chart
38:40 Annotating a single element
41:26 Color matching text with visual elements
41:58 Outro