JuniorProf has a great post up about graphical presentation. His point is that appearance and aesthetics do matter, because they help to convey professionalism and high standards. He's certainly right about that.
However, he's also right about something else he mentions in his post: that it takes time and effort to learn the programs that will let you create high-quality schematics (Illustrator et al). With the 1.4 million (approx.) other things that scientists need to spend their time on, should graphics programs be yet another?
One of my friends says that a research institute in our field employs real live graphical designers whose job it is to take your data or your sketched ideas and turn them into clear, attractive graphics. My friend, who is in the middle of putting together figures for his first paper, and attendant cursing, said that our school should do the same thing.
I can see the appeal of this, although I wonder if it turns into just one more job you need to administer that might be a bit faster to do yourself. The simple problem is that YOU are the best person to evaluate what's important in a graphic and what's expendable; what you want to highlight; what the field standards are for a given type of graphic; etc.
The other qualm I would have is that it's often useful to have nice-looking graphs before you have every last data point. I'm probably going to have to redo a couple of graphs for a paper we're on the verge of submitting because I'm going to get one missing data point. But we didn't really feel that that data point was missing until we made nice graphs and wrote the paper...
Much of my training in aesthetic design comes from Edward Tufte, whose marvelous examples of good and bad graphs guide my thinking. Although it takes me time and effort, I can create reasonably good-looking graphs (though JP has a point, schematics are another big leap).
Anyhow, to me it sounds like a hassle to have to explain to graphics designers how to draw your schematics. I'd rather have a savvy undergrad or tech do this for me. But perhaps some of you have experienced your own real live graphical designers and disagree?
15 years ago
5 comments:
I agree that having beautiful schematics and models is a nice thing, but as for data- well data is data and I fancying it up doesn't impress me in the slightest, if it is not great in the first place.
I agree that it may be a waste of time to administer someone else doing your graphics. It took me about a week to become pretty familiar with Illustrator and I'm feeling pretty comfortable with it now. My feeling is that it was worth it and I can easily do this on my own. Videos are a another issue... I'm not quite ready to start incorporating those into my talks but have seen others do it with great effect. However, you need some help (or to contract someone) to do those well.
For schematic diagrams or powerpoint slides, I'd love to have professional designers (but that isn't likely to happen).
For graphs, you have to be able to generate them from data. Use Matlab, Stata, R, matplotlib, gnuplot, whatever, but if you can't recreate publication ready graphs on demand from data... it's going to suck one day before the deadline and you find a bug in your analysis code.
I could use a graphic designer to help me out, definitely.
Sure, I can use all the programs, but at the end of the day, I just don't think in 2D.
And the kinds of movies I'd need to make to show how I think would require a lot of professional help.
Or maybe I'll quit science and make films instead. I hear they need more women in film.
Seriously though, I limp along by making deliberately cartoony schematics that emphasize the main ideas. Nothing worse than these complicated schematics (gives me a headache) that imply more than you intend (gets you in trouble).
I personally hate how people use shading and shadows to make their schematics look more textbook-like, as if they've already proven the model.
I've noticed that it tends to encourage the tendency to talk about those models as if they are Truthy instead of Testable. So I don't do that.
However, one former friend made a snotty comment about one of my cartoons, and said it would be more persuasive if I used more shading.
I mean, come on. Nothing about the SCIENCE??
Suffice it to say, that was just one of the reasons she's not anyone I would consider a friend anymore!
anyway i'll go read juniorprof's post now.
Making figures, talks, and especially posters is one of my favorite parts of the job. It's fun to get a little creative while finding the best way to communicate the information. I think it's like a puzzle. Plus, I always make my graphs a whole bunch of different ways before I settle on something. I'm sure a graphic designer would do a way better job than I do, but it wouldn't be as much fun and I still end up saying, what if we did it like this?.
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