Illustrating Complex Science Stories

Additional Reading and Resources

• Science Visualization Resources: An evolving Google Sheet of selected organizations, conferences, videos, and readings that I’ve maintained in response to specific requests from students, scientists, and artists interested in learning more about scientific visualization — from illustration to data visualization — and the work I do as a science-graphics editor. 
• Style.org: Collection of posts and talks by Jonathan Corum, an information designer and science-graphics editor at The New York Times. (Start with Design for an Audience)
• Data Stories, episode 59: Behind the Scenes of “What’s Really Warming The World?” with the Bloomberg Team: The hosts, Moritz Stefaner and Enrico Bertini, chat with the journalists Blacki Migliozzi and Eric Roston about how they developed the climate explainer, including interactions with the scientists behind the model, and the challenge of translating complex information into something accessible to a broad audience.
• “Advocating for Your Reader“: A presentation by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda for SciVizNYC 2018, in which she discusses developing science graphics for a lay audience.
• “Uncertainty + Visualization, Explained“: A series of posts by Jessica Hullman and Matthew Kay that summarize what empirical studies tell us about visualizing uncertainty in data, and strategies for representing it. This series is fairly technical and detailed. For a more succinct breakdown, see Hullman’s Scientific American article “How to Get Better at Embracing Unknowns.”