About the course | Intended audience | Prerequisites | Content details
About the course
Delivered in partnership with the Babraham Bioinformatics Group.
A practical introduction to designing clear, effective and publication-ready scientific figures.
Good figure design is an essential research skill. Clear visual communication improves the accessibility, interpretation and impact of scientific results in papers, posters, presentations and grant applications. This course introduces the principles of effective figure design, focusing on clarity, accessibility and visual communication rather than software-specific techniques.
Participants learn how to critically assess scientific figures, avoid common design mistakes and improve the presentation of complex experimental data.
By the end of the course, participants should be able to:
- identify the key principles of effective scientific figure design
- design figures that communicate results clearly and accurately
- improve figure layout, colour usage, typography and annotation
- avoid common visualisation and accessibility problems
- critically evaluate figures used in publications and presentations
- produce clearer and more consistent publication-ready figures
The course combines presentations, demonstrations and practical exercises using real-world scientific examples.
Back to top Intended audience
This course is suitable for:
- researchers and students preparing figures for publications, presentations or posters
- participants working with biological, biomedical or quantitative datasets
- researchers interested in improving visual communication and accessibility
- anyone producing scientific figures, diagrams or data visualisations
Prerequisites
No prior design experience is required.
Participants should have some familiarity with generating scientific plots or figures within their own research workflows.
Content details
The course combines lectures, demonstrations and practical exercises focused on improving scientific visual communication.
Topics covered include:
- Principles of effective figure design
Understanding how visual design influences interpretation and communication, with a focus on clarity, simplicity and scientific accuracy.
- Figure layout and visual hierarchy
Organising multi-panel figures, guiding viewer attention and designing layouts that communicate information efficiently.
- Colour, contrast and accessibility
Choosing effective colour palettes, avoiding misleading visual encodings and improving accessibility for colour-blind and diverse audiences.
- Typography, labels and annotations
Improving readability through effective use of fonts, labels, legends, arrows and figure annotations.
- Presenting quantitative data clearly
Selecting appropriate plot types, avoiding misleading graphical choices and improving the interpretation of statistical and experimental data.
- Critiquing and improving scientific figures
Evaluating examples of scientific figures, identifying common design problems and applying practical strategies to improve figure quality.
The course focuses on transferable design principles that can be applied across a wide range of scientific software and figure-generation tools.