When refereeing papers with plots of numerical simulations, I very often have to write back to the authors telling them that figures, while readable on the screen, where they can be blown up, are completely illegible when printed out in black and white.
When preparing images (MATLAB and matplotlib images anyways), unless you intend the figure to take up all of a letter sized paper, fonts and line widths must be checked for readability. For the typical size figure that you'll see in a publication, a font size of at least 16, and often 18, is needed for the axes labels, tick marks, and other elements. Line widths should generally be at least 2. These things can easily be set in MATLAB using the exportfig script. For matplotlib, consider editing your ~/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc file. You can set the default values for all of these graphical items as desired.
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