I <3 Adobe Illustrator (for scientific figure-making) and I hope that you will too

Guest post by Connie Jiang

As has been covered somewhat extensively (see here, here, and here), we are a lab that really appreciates the flexibility and ease with which one can use Illustrator to compile and annotate hard-coded graphical data elements to create figures. Using Illustrator to set things like font size, marker color, and line weighting is often far more intuitive and time-efficient than trying to do so programmatically. Furthermore, it can easily re-arrange/re-align graphics and create beautiful vector schematics, with far more flexibility than hard-coded options or PowerPoint.

So why don’t more people use Illustrator?

For one, it’s not cheap. We are lucky to have access to relatively inexpensive licenses through Penn. If expense is your issue, I’ve heard good things about Inkscape and Gimp, but unfortunately I have minimal experience with these and this document will not discuss them. Furthermore, as powerful and flexible as Illustrator is, its interface can be overwhelming. Faced with the activation energy and cognitive burden of having to learn how to do even basic things (drawing an arrow, placing and reshaping a text box without distorting the text it contains), maybe it’s unsurprising that so many people continue to use PowerPoint, a piece of software that most people in our lab first began experimenting with prior to 8th grade [AR editor’s note: uhhh… not everyone]. 

Recently, I decided to try to compile a doc with the express purpose of decreasing that activation energy of learning to use Illustrator to accomplish tasks that we do in the lab setting. Feel free to skip to the bottom if you’d just like to get to that link, but here were the main goals of this document:

1. Compile a checklist to run through for each figure before submission. This is a set of guidelines and standards we aim to adhere to in lab to maintain quality and consistency of figures.
2. Give a basic but thorough rundown of essentially everything in Illustrator that you need to begin to construct a scientific figure. Furthermore, impart the Illustrator “lingo” necessary to empower people to search for more specific queries.
3. Answer some of what I feel to be the most FAQs. Due to my love of science-art and general artistic/design experimentation, I’ve spent a lot of time in Illustrator, so people in lab will sometimes come to me with questions. These are questions like: “my figure has too many points and is slowing my Illustrator down: how can I fix it?” and “what’s the difference between linked and embedded images?”. Additionally, there are cool features that I feel like every scientist should be able to take advantage of, like “why are layers super awesome?” and “how can I select everything of similar appearance attributes?”.

Finally, a disclaimer: This document will (hopefully) give you the tools and language to use Illustrator as you see fit. It does not give any design guidance or impart aesthetic sense (aside from heavily encouraging you to not use Myriad Pro). Make good judgments~

Full Raj lab basic Illustrator guide can be found here.