Visual communication for scientists - UPDATED RESOURCES
- Maayan Harel
- Mar 21, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 6
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.
This post will be updated from time to time with Resources I think can be helpful for designing your scientific figures!
Thank you so much to everyone who attended these events at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, Heidelberg University, and the Weizmann Institute. If you think your institution or lab would benefit from a talk or workshop please contact me via email, or social media.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 Linkedin so please follow me there!
Resources
General Design for Scientific Figures
by Marc Vandemeulebroecke1, Mark Baillie , Alison Margolskee and Baldur Magnusson
Aiora Zabala's courses https://bioinformatics-core-shared-training.github.io/effective-figure-design/
Scientific Figure Design
Graphical Abstracts and Illustrations
Picturing Science: Design Patterns in Graphical Abstracts, Jessica Hullman and Benjamin Bach
Visual Science Communication Toolkit How to Make a Graphical Abstract for Your Scientific Paper, by Anna Clemens
Academic Posters
Derek Crowe's Butter Poster Templates (powerpoint)
Designing Presentation & Research Posters with Adobe Illustrator by the University of Michigan
Data Visualization
Books:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte (the godfather of DataViz)
The Truthful Art, by Alberto Cairo. Sample pages.
Online Resources:
Graphics Principles Cheat Sheet
Can Graphics Tell Lies? by Christopher Cabanski, Houston Gilbert, Sofia Mosesova
The Financial Times Visual Vocabulary Guide
DataWrapper Blog has lots of fantastic posts that are really applicable to different software.
A designer's Perspective on Data Visualization, MIT Communication Lab
The 10 Most Common Data Visualisation Mistakes People Make by Dr. Anna Clemens
Color Palette Design
The Misuse of Color In Science Communication, Nature Communications 2020 Fabio Crameri, Grace E. Shephard & Philip J. Heron
How to Choose Colors for Your Data Visualizations by Michael Yi
What to Consider When Choosing Colors for Data Visualization by Lisa Charlotte Rost
Paul Tol's Notes and Palettes
Tools and Palettes:
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 Resizeable 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. Art prints of the graph are available for sale here.
To receive a free high-resolution, printable pdf version, click the image!
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