Resource of the Week #24: A Resource on Designing Figures

Hello again! This week a colleague showed me a new article on how to design figures. Because this article can help many researchers, I've made it a Resource of the Week.

This article—“A Brief Guide to Designing Effective Figures for the Scientific Paper”—appeared last month in the journal Advanced Materials. The authors are a scientist and 2 design specialists.

The authors’ advice can aid in designing figures (for example, diagrams and graphs) not only in the sciences but also in other fields.

Some of the advice in this article is the following:

• If you do an outline before writing a paper, show in it where you will place the figures.
• Consider using a grid to organize the items in a figure.
• Use a feature such as size, shape, or color to indicate the most important information.
• Keep figures simple.
• Use sans-serif fonts for type in figures.

Much of the advice applies to designing figures both for papers and for other purposes, such as presentations. If you prepare items that include figures, I encourage you to look at this article.

Until the next post— Barbara