Welcome to Lesson #6 of the SciComm Society “Making An Impact” email course!

Yesterday, we tried to visualise your science by using active language and powerful verbs. Today, we will try to actually visualise your science through illustrations.

This will help you reach even more people with your research and help your audience learn about it.

Lesson #6: Show your SciComm with illustrations and graphics

The idea of creating something visual to represent your SciComm may make you recoil. But don’t worry: you won’t have to actually draw anything unless you want to!

Here, I want to encourage you to think of engaging ways to visualise your research topic. You can go back to your post inbox from day 1 and think about which of these topics you can explain visually.

As with a graphical abstract for your research paper, use an illustration to help your audience better understand your research. Show the processes, key players and main functions of your topic or concept and how they interact with each other.

Use vivid colours to bring the illustration to life, but remember that simplicity is key. Only show the key players and processes you mention in the post so as not to overwhelm your audience.

To illustrate your research topic, you can create a graphic, illustration or infographic. Choose what makes the most sense and feels most comfortable to you.

Use one of these ideas to visualise your science:

1. Emojis: A very simple way to showcase your research visually is by using emojis. I recommend creating a social media post with five emojis that relate to your research, accompanied by brief explanations of each. You can also create an image using only the emojis (see #3 for a way to do this) and explain them in more depth in the post itself.
2. BioRender: This tool gives you everything you need to explain your scientific concept visually. BioRender has science-related icons, templates and workflows for you to put together into a science illustration. Many researchers even use this tool to create graphics for scientific publications (you have to pay for it to use it in a journal, but it’s free for web publishing).
3. Canva: You can easily create graphics using the Canva website. It has templates for social media graphics in sizes appropriate for various platforms. There are free graphics and photos that you can add to the templates, and you’ve got yourself a SciComm visual.
4. Collaborate with an artist: If you are not comfortable with drawing or illustrating (that’s probably most of us!), seek out a collaboration with an artist. I have done this throughout my SciComm ventures and have loved the creations that resulted.

Create your social media post

Today’s task is to select one of the options above, create an illustration and post it on social media. Explain the graphic in your post to help your audience understand and learn. Use the hashtag #mySCSimpact so I can see what you came up with!

If you want to share it directly with me, hit reply and send me the link to your post.

Sarah

⏪ Go back to Lesson #5

Go to Lesson #7 ⏩