Looking for resources for a biophysicist friend of mine has to give a workshop on "how to design good scientific figures"

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Hey all, something not-directly related to observable but still (I think) fitting for the community: I have a friend who is coordinating a masters/PhD on biophysics. Among other things she has to teach her students how to design good figures (as in, enhancing the data and not confusing or misleading).

She has reached out to me for advice, but I have to admit: I’m kind of self-taught in a very unstructured manner, knowing only stuff on the random topics that catch my interest or directly relate to my own “disability” in data-viz land due to color-blindness.

So I’m asking here if anyone has recommendations for sources and/or workshops on the topic, or feels like giving a workshop like that themselves (she has told me that there is a budget for formal workshops, although not for “informal discussions”). To clarify: we are not so much looking for good sources on the technical side of things but on the insightful side of data viz design.

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A rough overview might be Amelia Wattenberger’s P5 process:

You might also want to join https://d3js.zulipchat.com/ and create a discussion (“stream”) there.

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Fun question. The Internet seems to have loads of discussion on this topic. Here’s one well presented and interesting discussion.

It might also be fun to look into projects experimenting with AI tools for selecting ‘effective’ data visualizations based on data analysis, e.g. this and that.

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Thank you both for the links! I’ll forward them to my friend. The Zulip chat is also a fine idea, I’ll suggest that to her as well

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