Visual communication for scientists resources, & Good figures in 6 Steps
Updated: May 18, 2022
I am currently offering lectures and workshops focused on Visual Communication for Scientists- online and in person! I ran a quick Twitter poll and it seems that this kind of training is badly needed.
Art prints of the graph are available for sale here.
If you think your institution or lab would benefit from a talk or workshop please contact me via email, or social media. Thank you so much to everyone who attended these events at Science Abroad, Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University.
This post will be updated from time to time with resources I think can be helpful to you for designing your scientific figures! I also offer consulting services starting at $50 for a 30-minute session. I find that in 30 minutes I can give clear feedback and provide step-by-step guidance for how to achieve your desired results! I also share some tips and resources on Twitter so please follow me there!
Resources
General Design for Scientific Figures
Design Strategies for Scientific Figures, the University of Texas at Austin
Aiora Zabala's courses https://bioinformatics-core-shared-training.github.io/effective-figure-design/
Scientific Figure Design
https://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/training.html#figuredesign
https://descienceblog.tumblr.com/
Graphical Abstracts
Picturing Science: Design Patterns in Graphical Abstracts, Jessica Hullman and Benjamin Bach
https://www.annaclemens.com/blog/make-graphical-abstract-paper
Posters:
https://www.echorivera.com/blog/better-posters-recommendation
https://derekcrowe.net/butterposter
https://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design/
Data Visualization
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte
The Financial Times Visual Vocabulary Guide
DataWrapper Blog has lots of fantastic posts that are really applicable to different software.
Visualization of Biomedical Data, Annual Reviews
https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/home/designers-perspective-on-data-viz/
https://www.echorivera.com/blog/anna-clemens-dataviz-presentations
Color Palette Design
https://medium.com/nightingale/how-to-choose-the-colors-for-your-data-visualizations-50b2557fa335
https://www.dataquest.io/blog/what-to-consider-when-choosing-colors-for-data-visualization/
Paul Tol
GeoDataViz has some very nice accessible qualitative and sequential palettes (I'm not as keen on the diverging ones).
Colorblindness Simulators: These also simulate grayscale.
Coblis (image upload)
Color Oracle full desktop simulator (Mac, PC, Linux)
Sim Daltonism sizeable window - my favorite! (Mac)
BONUS!
6 Steps to Making a Good Figure, along with my graph of Forms of Visual Representation and the Graphics Scientists Make.
To receive a free high-resolution, printable pdf version, click the image!
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