I present clearly, connect broadly, spark imagination and encourage enthusiasm for inquiry and explanation. I create visuals with analytical clarity and artistic dimensions.
On power, aesthetics, materiality and change in data visualization
Notes from the Information+ Conference at MIT/Northeastern University, Boston.
A checklist for designing and improving the visualization of scientific data
Creating clear and engaging scientific figures is crucial to communicate complex data. In this Comment, I condense principles from design, visual perception and data visualization research in a checklist that can help researchers to improve their data visualization, by focusing on clarity, accessibility and design best practices.
How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers. Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time). With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined. Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.
Information is Beautiful
Distilling the world's data, information & knowledge into beautiful infographics & visualizations
Prof. Judy Fan: Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible
Prof. Judy Fan: Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible
An Award-winning Data Visualization Designer
Visual Cinnamon | Data Visualization Design & Data Art | Data made insightful, effective & beautiful through data visualization and data art
Getting Started with Claude Code: A Researcher’s Setup Guide
Video 1 in a series on Claude Code
Manuscript — an imagined editor for research writing
A walk through an imagined product for academic writing, mocked up by Claude Design.
Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations
Phylopic, NIH Bioart, Bioicons, Scidraw, Open Science Art, Health Icons, Servier Medical Art, Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Noun Project, Segment Anything, Excalidraw, draw.io, Biographics
The new way we’ll do science
Papers should become human-readable views over a graph of data, tools, results, and certificates.
The Daily Planet #124: The Anatomical Compiler - The Daily Planet
Cosmograph: Beautiful visualization and analytics right in the browser | Cosmograph
Beautiful visualization and analytics right in the browser
