By Erin Walsh and Alice Wetherell
2. Alice Wetherell (biography)
Visual abstracts, media releases, infographics, posters, and publications….
More and more often, to enhance their outreach, engagement and impact, researchers need to present their work in a visual way. For some, this can feel like being asked to present their work in a different language. Not everyone has the time or the skills to translate their research into visual form. Working with visual artists can help, but sometimes the barrier between metaphorical text and visual language can make effective collaboration difficult.
What are some easy steps for both researchers and visual artists to make this collaborative process work smoothly?
We are, respectively, a scientific illustrator and multimedia artist. Between us, we have over twenty years of experience helping researchers illustrate their work.
Here are eight tips that we’ve found can make collaboration between researchers and visual artists more efficient, productive, and enjoyable. Seven of the eight tips apply to researchers; five of the eight to visual artists.
Tip #1 – Figure out what you want to convey
For: researchers
If you don’t have a clear idea of why you’re asking for an illustration, the artist will not have a clear idea of what to draw. You’re the expert on your topic. An artist shouldn’t have to read and condense your thesis! Find your key message and secondary messages, consider your audience, and distil why your research is important to them.
Tip #2 – Rough it out
For: researchers
If you’re struggling to put together an unambiguous, clear written or verbal description, stick figures, rough sketches and scribbled-on photos can be very helpful. The point of stick figures, for example, is to think about what you want the people in your visualisation to look like and what should they be doing.
Tip #3 – Find your dos and don’ts
For: researchers and visual artists
Rather than starting from scratch, it can be good to know where you want to head. Find examples of the kind of visual you want to make (eg., infographic, poster, etc.), especially those used by peers with similar research topics. Pick some examples to discuss with each other. Focus on what you think is excellent and terrible, and why. Characteristics might be font, colour scheme, layout, or form (eg., pie chart versus bar chart). The researcher will know a lot about what is substantively correct (eg., acceptability of axis truncation or scaling), the visual artist will know a lot about how the viewer will interpret the work (eg., font readability and colour scheme accessibility).
Tip #4 – Don’t overstuff it
For: researchers and visual artists
Less is more. It is better to convey one concept clearly than have a muddled depiction of three concepts. If you are struggling to fit all the elements of a visual into a single A4 page with legible text (10pt or 12pt minimum), you are probably trying to include too much. Consider an alternative approach, such as including information in a figure legend, or having a detailed table with a companion summary visual.
Tip #5 – Be realistic in your timelines
For: researchers
Provide enough lead time for the visual artist. Think about how long it takes to draft a manuscript with a colleague; even for short pieces, it takes time to go from an idea to a final written work. A good visual also takes time to develop. Essentially the creative process involves three steps:
- Working out what needs to be done; this is the longest part (tips #1 and #2 help!)
- Actually doing it
- Revisions and tweaking; this should be the shortest part!
Tip #6 – Be decisive
For: researchers and visual artists
Avoid meetings that don’t result in actionable decisions, or vague e-mail back and forth. While some flexibility is good, when everyone’s workload is quite high it can be important to ensure decision points are aligned with a clear timeline, and are not second-guessed. For example, even minor changes to text content or font in an infographic can cause substantial time-consuming adjustments to re-balance the whole design.
Tip #7: Don’t take it personally (unless it is made personal)
For: visual artists
Research culture is often characterised by constructive, blunt criticism of intellectual or creative works. In-depth, lengthy feedback from a researcher can be intended as sign of investment and collegiality but can sometimes be experienced as fussy or disapproving. It’s important that your expertise and time are respected, but if the critique is limited to the work, try not to take it personally.
Tip #8: Ownership and attribution
For: researchers and visual artists
An image can be substantively and aesthetically perfect, but not fit for purpose due to intellectual property issues or attribution disputes. It is paramount that a discussion about ownership and attribution is had early on in the collaborative relationship. For researchers, their institution owns all of their outputs, and this ownership is transferred upon publication. For visual artists, there are myriad considerations and options for managing intellectual property. These include whether their image is based on or incorporates prior work, font licenses, software end-user agreements. There is also the question of who owns the image: are they licencing it to the researcher, or transferring ownership to them? Does this arrangement include all intermediate drafts/sketches, and future derivatives of the image? How will the artist be attributed – no attribution, by name in a figure caption, by name in an “acknowledgements” section, or elsewhere?
What do you think? Do these lessons resonate with you? Do you have other tips to share, either from the perspective of a researcher or visual artist?
Biography: Erin Walsh PhD is a senior researcher with the Population Health Exchange (PHXchange) at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) at the Australian National University in Canberra. In addition to her quantitative and qualitative population health research, she focuses on the use of visualisation as a tool for communicating population health information, with ongoing interests in cross-disciplinary methodological synthesis. She works as a scientific illustrator, offering assistance with stimuli preparation, data visualization, and figure preparation for scholarly publication or engaging the general public with science.
Biography: Alice Wetherell BA BSc is the Multimedia Officer within the Population Health Exchange (PHXchange) at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her previous employment includes 2D hand-drawn animation for television and games, 3D computer-generated animation for the games industry and designing print media. She aids impact and engagement of research via visuals – infographics, animation, podcasts, illustrations, publications and videos.
This is a wonderful set of tips for what can be a challenging collaboration, especially when the researchers work in an area that doesn’t frequently involve visualization or graphics. I have just three minor follow-on suggestions for three of the tips.
Tip 2 (Rough it out): Some of the recent AI image generators can be very helpful for creating visuals from descriptions in text. They’re also a lot of fun to play around with, and they can provide an entertaining way for even the most sketch-challenged researcher to get their idea across to the visual artist.
Tip 5 (Be realistic in your timelines): Make sure that the researcher understands that creating an effective visual often requires multiple iterations (or “drafts”), just like writing a paper. I’ve encountered plenty of researchers who believe that an artist somehow just does it in one go.
Tip 6 (Be decisive): Early on, try to agree on the stage(s) at which one or more preliminary versions of the visual will be presented for feedback from the researcher. It can be problematic if, for instance, the artist wants to get feedback from a preliminary ideas-study whereas the researcher is expecting to see a finished product.
I hope these are helpful—and again, nicely done!
Thanks for your thoughts, Mike – insightful extensions to our list of eight. The metaphor of iterations like drafting a paper fits really well.