Aesthetics in Science

Visualizing data in a transparent, informative, and aesthetically pleasing way is important. Other researchers may remember your work better and this may, in turn, increase the impact of your work in the field. Learn what works well aesthetically. Spent as much time on data visualization and scientific figures as you do writing good paragraphs for your manuscript.

Colors

A really amazing webpage for choosing colors: https://coolors.co/
Adobe colors are also useful for choosing colors for your figures
Read this amazing blog about colors. It will teach you most you need to know. Read about amazing color combinations you can use while making sure individuals with color blindness can read your graphs.
Other inspiration for colorbars can be found here

Visualization

Types of plots

If you would like to learn how to visualize data in MATLAB well, maybe check out these great MATLAB visualization tutorials.
You can also use Python to plot your data. Read this tutorial on how to visualize in Python or this perhaps.

A great, useful – and beautiful – resource of different kinds of graphs, by the Financial Times: Visual Vocabulary
Interesting blogs/posts on how to plot prettier by Anne Urai, Pierre Morel, and Mathworks.

Example plots for two conditions (Figure above):

Download matlab functions for plots two, three, four, and five. For plot three and six you will need the plotSpread functions.
The full code for the plots on the right can be downloaded here. It requires that you also download the functions mentioned above.

Video tutorials

Are you new to building scientific figures? In this section, you will find video tutorials about the basics on how to build scientific figures for your talks, posters, and manuscripts.

Brief theoretical overview (~18 min):

You will learn why scientific figure building is more than providing relevant information
You will be provided with examples about a few simple things you may want to look out for when building your figure
You will learn a little bit about vector graphics

Download pdf

Hands-on Inkscape tutorial (~26 min):

You will learn the basics on how to build a scientific figure using the vector graphics program Inkscape (free download here)
You may also download the pixel graphics program Gimp which can help with converting your final figure into a *.png or *.tiff file (free download here)

Icons and other resources

Icons can be useful for presentations, posters, or manuscripts. Bioicons provides icons free for use: https://bioicons.com
Other Icon resources can be found from The Noun Project. Some of these can be used freely, others may have some restrictions.
Good stock images, many of them freely usable, can be found at https://unsplash.com/