The desired size of the tickmarks depends on whether I am
> creating a plot for publication, or for a talk. I find
> that I tweak this quite a bit in Matlab, looking for the
> most appealing result (I started in graphic design, 10
> years ago).
The easiest way to set the size of the tick labels is
labels = get(gca(), 'xtickabels')
set(labels, 'fontsize', 12)
I also end up doing the same thing, tweaking line size, font size and
weight, etc, to make figures that show up nicely in small journal
formats.
JDH