I organized a discussion between colleagues on your methods to produce figures for articles and presentations.
Tobit Caudwell presented how He produces his figures with Matlab and Latex.
The pdf of my presentation on how I produce figures with Python and Matplotlib can be found here.
The code used to produce the figures and the presentation can be downloaded with Mercurial by running:
hg clone https://heptapod.host/meige/figures_articles
If you just want to learn more on how to produce figures with Matplolib, I'd advice to start by trying some examples scripts.