Lucky seven!


This blog began seven years ago today. And it’s still one of my favourite projects. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.

Picture by Lee Bryan on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

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Search engines for technical graphics

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How important are academic graphics? A new pre-print in arXiv argues, “Pretty damn important.” This news summary of the technical article says: (T)heir most remarkable discovery is that the most successful papers tend to have more figures. By plotting the number of diagrams in a paper against its impact, the team concludes that high impact ideas tend to be conveyed visually. Lee and co say there are two possible explanations for this: “That visual information improves the clarity of the paper, leading to more citations, and higher impact, or that high impact papers naturally tend to include new, complex ideas that require visual explanation.” The team has a search engine for scientific graphics called Viziometrics. My first pass, for “crayfish,” gave a mess on non-intuitive results (click to enlarge): Things improved markedly when I selected only for diagrams and photos, however. Speaking of searchable graphics databases, Atlas looks promising for some purposes. I tried searc...
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Critique: frog choices

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The “Best of Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology” continues, with this contribution courtesy of Matthew Murphy! Click to enlarge! This is a very successful poster on multiple counts. There is not a lot of text. The visuals are simple, with a strong but limited colour palette. The reading order is clear. Matthew wrote: Almost all of the elements of the poster were created using open-source graphic design software. Some preliminary work (especially editing the reference image of the frog icon) was done in GIMP. The vector images were developed in InkScape, and the whole thing was assembled in InkScape. I used an individual layer for each section. The fonts used are Steve Matteson’s Open Sans and Open Sans Extrabold, both freely available through Google Fonts. With open source materials, I have argued that you sometimes get what you pay for . When I saw this poster, I wondered if Open Sans had the chops necessary for the job, because I was struck by the dumb quotes (also calle...
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Critique: Sciencing on eggshells

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A colleague of mine was at the 9th Bird Working Group Meeting, The archaeology of human-bird interactions . He snapped a pic of a poster by Beatrice Demarchi which he thought would interest me. It did. I contacted Bea... who thought I was punking her. I almost binned the message thinking that it was a joke then I figured that it must have been real as not many people know about the Bird Working Group! :) She was nice enough to send along a better version of the poster. Click to enlarge! I love the clarity and simplicity of vision here. I love how text and visuals, instead of being two separate elements, are fused into one element. The words are the picture. I was impressed, because I had tried to design something similar – text forming the outline of a shape – for a t-shirt. I was not able to make the text fit the shape anywhere near as well as Bea did. She explained how she did it (lightly edited): I popped an image of the bird into Adobe Illustrator, and then text that sort...
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