visualising artwork – EMBL Events

Isn’t it always the way? You have amazing results, but you can see your colleagues’ eyes glaze over when you try to explain it to them. Why not try to present your data in a visually appealing way, and make sure all eyes are on your work?

1. Make the data speak for itself

When you start to think about visualising your data, try to make them as standalone as possible. If you are presenting the work – for example, on a poster at a conference – make sure the visualisation is clear and comprehensible, so that people can grasp the concept without you needing to stand there and explain it.

2. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

One thing you have to realise – people want information, and they want it fast! They’re not going to read the captions, they’re not going to read all the beautiful text you’ve written, so the more you can put directly on the visualisation to help people understand it, the better.

3. Drama, darling!

When you start talking about creating illustrations for more broad communication other factors come into play – use dramatic elements, make it eye-catching, appeal to human emotion, make it relatable and appealing, or possibly even controversial! It needs to stir emotions!

4. Determine your target audience

Obviously if you’re going to publish in a scientific journal it’s really important to be accurate, because you’re trying to communicate with peers who have a similar level of knowledge to you. If you’re on the front page of the New York Times it’s probably more important to engage people and get people interested.

5. Understand the concept

If you’re looking at complex multivariable relationship start by looking at the individual variables, and make sure that you understand what’s going on at a low level before you try and do something more complex.

6. Don’t skip the planning phase

Decide on the concept. Sketch your plan. Draw a storyboard. Record narration if required. Once these processes are done you can move onto the design, and then we go into the design, modelling and animation process – depending on which medium you’ve chosen for your visualisation.

7. Find patterns
By visualising biological data, scientists can see patterns. Find these patterns and make them stand out, and in doing so you’ll be able to better communicate your ideas to others and get them excited about your science.

8. Filter, map and render
There are 3 main steps to getting your work visualised:

First you filter the data to find exactly what you need
Then you map – this might be working out how the data corresponds to the spatial layout of the visualisation
Then it’s time to render – this is how you then encode the change or the signal on that map you have created.

9. Keep it simple
Don’t try to put too much information in. Think about what needs to be removed to keep the message as concise and impactful as possible. It’s more important to get people excited about what you’re trying to show them than to convey every last detail 100% correctly.

10. Determine your software
There are a number of tools out there that you can use to look at different types of data. Having visualisations that are done in Keynote or PowerPoint can be just as good as long as you know they’re useful.

Graphics programs such as the Adobe Illustrator Suite enable us to create a wide range of things. An excellent tool for scientists to create visualisations is a software program called R. It’s a programming language and an environment for interactive data science and data

Get inspired!

Check out these pages for great visualisation!

https://vizbi.org/Posters/
https://beatascienceart.com/

Original video with Janet Iwasa, Hadley Wickham, Seán O’Donoghue and James Proctor

The effective visualisation of your results and ideas improves the discoverability, accessibility and impact of your work.

As visual culture and science historian Geoffrey Belknap concluded in an essay for Nature last year: “The visual continues to work as a foundation for making sense of data. The tools, as we have seen, have radically changed. The power of images has not.” (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03306-9).

Condensing your key findings into simple, visually appealing illustrations and infographics allows you to share your work on more diverse platforms and with more diverse audiences, increasing the reach and impact of your science.

Whether you work in collaboration with a graphic designer, or whether you apply key principles of design to your communication yourself, the following aspects are important for the effective and compelling visual presentation of data and ideas.

1. Tell a story through design

Humans seem almost programmed to connect with stories on both an intellectual and emotional level. As such, stories are powerful tools for communication. When creating an illustration or infographic, think about what story you want to tell and how it will engage your audience: What ‘characters’ (in this context, usually: genes, cells, pathways, diseases etc.) should be the focus of the story? Who is the story for and what interests them? Can you connect your story to their interests? What emotions do you want them to feel? The answers to these questions will help you focus on the aspects of your discovery that need to be prioritised and how to visualise them.

2. As complex as necessary, as simple as possible

If you are creating an infographic for specialists in your own field, then you can use specialist language and make assumptions about the prior knowledge of your audience. The further away your audience is in terms of expertise or experience from your peers, the more background and context you will need to provide, and the simpler your language and the concepts you illustrate will need to be.

3. Conceptualising is exploring, so draw sketches first

Just as you might conduct exploratory experiments before committing to a research approach, explore your storyline from different angles to see what works for you, your message and your audience. This is done most effectively by sketching ideas by hand in black and white. Experience shows that using software for this exploration can be distracting, either because the tools are not intuitive, or because the colours and options available in software steal focus from the goal: to find the compelling visual idea.

4. Loop the loop to refine your ideas

Think of the design process as moving forward in loops, rather than as a straight line. When you feel like you have a good idea, revisit it and ask yourself: Are all the elements shown key to the story, or can I leave some out? Simplifying means that you will communicate more clearly and that your audience will more quickly understand what is presented.

5. Design tools: use them effectively by using them sparingly

Once you are happy with your concept sketch, it is time to draw the final artwork. In your concept sketch, you laid out all the elements and probably already made some decisions about sizes and composition. You will now make additional choices about fonts and colours. As tempting as the numerous options might be, try to be restrained in your choices to ensure the graphic is clear and legible: One font with four font faces (regular, italic, bold, bold italic) and two or three colours initially are often sufficient to distinguish elements. You can always add more colour later if necessary, and starting out simple helps you to not clutter your illustration. Revisiting your artwork frequently helps you to keep it as simple as possible and as complex as necessary.

6. Plan your media strategy ahead

A lot of time will go in developing the idea for your graphic and drawing the actual artwork. Spend some time early on to think about how you can best use the same artwork across multiple communication channels. Different media require different sizes and file formats. To cater for this variety, draw you artwork using vector-based software like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. Vector-based illustrations, unlike pixel-based illustrations, can be scaled up or down without any quality-loss.

7. Attention is a limited resource

Thousands of articles, ideas and information are communicated daily, so people browse content quickly. If your graphic is eye-catching and easy to understand at a glance, it will both draw your reader’s interest to know more, and give them the key message about your findings in only a few seconds.

Sandra Krahl runs a course for EMBO Solutions on Applying Design Principles to Schematic Figures for scientists – for more information and to register, visit http://lab-management.embo.org/dates/design

Original video with Tabea Rauscher, Design Team Lead at EMBL, and Sandra Krahl, EMBO Alumna and Senior Graphic Designer and Illustrator

Tag: visualising artwork

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