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Presentation Quality Graphics

Developing presentation and publication quality graphics

Here are some resources for basic help with figure design and color selection:

Color selection guidelines and tools

Here are links to tools and pages that can be useful in selecting color palettes that improve understanding of your figures, as well as expanding the audience for who those figures work.

Tools for presentation graphics

If you are looking for tools for accessing or implementing different color palettes or color ramps in software packages, you should see my Wiki entry on using better palettes in common plotting packages. The rest of this topic is providing information and links to packages that you can use to create and improve your presentation graphics.

Tools for drawing

Here are links to tools that can be useful for creating schematics and flow charts:

  • Powerpoint - fairly easy to use, but need to recognize that its tools are basic and it provides limited control of output image quality.
  • Adobe Illustrator - Lots more control and options, which makes it harder to pick up quickly, but worth the investment. Adobe licensing is a challenge, check out Purdue's licensing agreement at Adobe Creative Cloud licensing to find out how to use the software. Adobe Illustrator is now part of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite.
  • BioRender tool to create science figures quickly. Designed for life scince fields, but can be used more broadly (though icons and templates may be less relevent. This is used in ABE graduate student seminar and Purdue has licensing options, but I do not have specific information on the license as of writing this entry.
  • Inkspace - free, multi-platform, open-source drawing package used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams and line art.
  • Xfig - compatible with Linux/Unix platforms and appears to still be maintained but no longer a standard install package.

Tools for working with photos

Here are links for tools to help with photo editing tasks:

  • Most OS have basic photo editors embedded, look on-line for information about the best to use with your system.
  • Adobe Photoshop - Lots more options and control, which makes it harder to get up and running but worth learning if you want to manipulate photos and similar images. See Adobe Illustrator (above) for links to the Adobe license.
  • GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) - available on many Unix/Linux platforms or can be installed on most operating systems now, including OS X and Microsoft Windows. Much of the functionality of Photoshop, but as a free and open source download.
  • ImageMagick - available on most Unix/Linux systems, this is a free and open source image manipulation tool that primarily works on the command line. Does anything from simple image format conversions to more complicated command line photo editing. Works extremely well for automating an image processing pipeline, where standard changes are applied to a large number of images.