Effective visual communication in the sciences

Thursday 24 Nov 2022, 10:00 → 16:30 Europe/Berlin

Seminar Rooms (Campus Telegraphenberg, Building H)

Luca Malatesta (GFZ)

Short Summary

In this short course, we will cover fundamental rules of graphic design applied to science visuals and pay particular attention to the proper usage of color. The course will be split in two with a lecture in the morning and an optional workshop in the afternoon. We will learn how to structure the hierarchy of visual cues (axes, data points, grids, text) to match the hierarchy of information (data values, axes marks, labels) and give intuitive meaning to graphics to simplify the reader’s task. We will discuss the use of color to convey quantitative information and identify associated pitfalls and safe approaches. The afternoon will be run on jupyter notebooks and the participants choice of vector design software (illustrator, inkscape, affinity). The participants are expected to have a basic knowledge of jupyter notebooks. We will first work with datasets requiring different colormaps. Then we will shift our attention to figures that the participants are working on in their current research and brainstorm improvements to their design.