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Guide: A great Adobe Illustrator guide has been created by the Raj lab at U. Penn.! Here is a blog post with some background, including some additional linked blog posts that I also recommend reading (especially this one). This covers many of the basic tools and use cases in Illustrator and is tailored towards scientific figures.
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Colorblindness: Ensure you are being colorblind-friendly when designing graphics. Will try to add some tips and resources here later.
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Art / Icon Sources: There are several options for free art, icons, etc. that may be useful for creating figures.
- Biorender: Very popular and extensive library. Required license (i.e., not open-source), which is currently share as a lab - inquire with Kristen about the login credentials. More licenses are available from HMS - does not appear to be free (see https://it.hms.harvard.edu/service/biorender).
- NIH BioArt Source: Open-source repository of 2000+ science and medical art visuals from NIAID.
- bioicons: A large, open-source library of bio-themed art and icons.
- SciDraw: A free repository of drawings.
- Phylopic: A large, open source library of silhouette images for various forms of life.
- Nerd Fonts: Open-source, icon library. Better for non-biological icons, like generic computer icons. Aggregated from Font Awesome and other resources. You can browse or search using keywords.
- Reactome Icon Library: Reactome has made a large, open-source library of cell/molecular biology icons freely available.
- Emojis: Emojis can be useful for certain purposes and there are a ton of options that have been standardized as a form of font by Unicode. They also offer a range of skin tones (for human emojis) and can help ensure everyone feels welcome.
- Biographics: A simple, free tool for building graphics using open-source art.
- Color palettes: There are almost unlimited color palettes available for producing figures. For simple delineation of 2-3 experimental conditions or similar purposes, it should be fine to artibrarily pick some colors. However, when plotting genomics data, we typically have more to label or need to color continuous data, in which case it makes more sense to use pre-defined color palettes. Here are user-friendly sources of palettes that will be compatible with the software R, which is what the computational biologists usually use for producing plots.
- Color Palette Finder: A nice interactive palette explorer that shows you what the color looks like with some example plots. You can also filter for certain types of palettes (i.e., continuous or categorical data).
- List of R Color Palettes: A basic list of color palettes available in R that was put together by someone. In this case, palettes are broken down by package and there are many options. This same person also has a package paletteer that allows one to work with palettes from across these packages.
- Basic Document Setup Information: Here is some basic information about how you should be setting up your documents for optimal use.
- Page Size: Letter (8.5 x 11 inches or 612 x 792 pixels/pts for portrait; inverse for landscape)
- Color Mode: RGB (suggested default; more flexible; best for digital viewing) or CMYK (less flexible; best for printing)
- Raster Effects: High (300 ppi)
- Example Plots: This repository contains several example plots that are popular in the lab to help with learning Illustrator