Visual Strategies A Practical Guide to Graphics for Scientists and Engineers Felice C. Frankel, Angela H. DePace

Visual Strategies is an essential guide to communicating scientific findings and concepts through graphics for researchers in all disciplines.

Any scientist or engineer who communicates research results will immediately recognize this practical handbook as an indispensable tool. The guide sets out clear strategies and offers abundant examples to assist researchers — even those with no previous design training — with creating effective visual graphics for use in multiple contexts, including journal submissions, grant proposals, conference posters, and presentations.

Visual communicator Felice Frankel and systems biologist Angela DePace, along with experts in various fields, demonstrate how small changes can vastly improve the success of a graphic image. They dissect individual graphics, show why some work while others don’t, and suggest specific improvements. The book includes analyses of graphics that have appeared in such journals as Science, Nature, Annual Reviews, Cell, PNAS, and the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as an insightful personal conversation with designer Stefan Sagmeister and narratives by prominent researchers and animators.

"In this technoscientific century, with knowledge doubling every decade, researchers and designers alike need to ramp up their presentation of the material they describe. This beautifully illustrated book shows how."—Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology, Harvard University

"A thoughtful and useful series of recommendations that will actually help you understand what you are doing when you are trying to make yourself clear."—Milton Glaser

"Scientists presenting even simple data to busy journal readers are well advised to invest some thought in their visual comprehensibility and impact. This unique book provides exactly what they need: copious case studies across the disciplines, wise principles and the authors’ outstanding creativity, experience and integrity—in both technical and ethical senses—in visualizing the results of science."—Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief, Nature

"Anyone—scientist or not —who is interested in using pictures to teach, to convey information, or to catch attention must study this book. It is splendid. In it you learn: what information can be conveyed graphically, how to design images for maximum intelligibility and interest, how to draw in the reader, and what successful images look like. As a bonus, you get a cheerfully readable style, you learn about some extremely interesting research, you see how some very good researchers, drawn from across science, think about what they do in terms of images, and you have the pleasure of a brilliantly laid-out book."—George M. Whitesides, Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor, Harvard University

"Unique... an essential guide to literacy for fields that are essential to all our lives."—Steven Heller, School of Visual Arts

"A lavish, lab-friendly guide to transforming dry data into insightful images." Katy Borner, Nature

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