- Articles on Scientific Illustration
- Tools for Diagrams and Scientific Rendering
- Alternatives to Adobe Programs
- 🌈 📊 Color/Data Visualization Color Palette Generators
Articles on Scientific Illustration
How to Make Scientific Illustrations that Shine
Tools for Diagrams and Scientific Rendering
BioRender
Use your NYU sign-on to create figures.
NIH BioArt Source
Free illustrations, figures, icons, brushes, and vectors.
Bioicons
Reactome
Library of icons for biology.
Servier Medical Art
Pymol
Molecular visualization through Python.
And, unlike BioRender, visualizations you create in PyMol can be published in journal articles because they don't infringe on copyrights.
Alternatives to Adobe Programs
Pixlr (free and open-source alternative to Photoshop)
Photopea
Inkscape
Affinity Creative Software
Affinity is also another popular alternative to the Adobe products. It’s not free, but it’s a one time payment between $70-170 depending on your package. This also includes free upgrades for life. Personally, I think their apps for iPad are far superior than Adobe’s, which I find buggy and clunky.
🌈 📊 Color/Data Visualization Color Palette Generators
ColorBrewer
Useful for maps and large datasets. Plus, you can do a color blindness check.
Coolers
https://coolors.co/ will allow you to generate a lot of interesting palettes even in the free version. The paid version allows you to share, continue to edit, test out various media outputs, and do UX accessibility testing.
Adobe Color Wheel
It's kind of what https://color.adobe.com/ is trying to become but is still not as successful. The Adobe tools are useful because you can connect the palettes straight to your cloud account and have access to them everywhere.
VizPalette
https://projects.susielu.com/viz-palette by Susie Lu & Elijah Meeks is one of the best overall because you can see how the colors you select or generate in different graph types, against different backgrounds, with and without strokes, and the relationship of the colors to each other. The latter is really important if your data is hierarchical or has some type of gradient relationship.
Smart Things | oklch-smooth
This is more color science-y but good if you are looking into sRGBs. https://www.s-ings.com/scratchpad/oklch-smooth/
Beyonce Palettes
😂 and for the visualizations that are inspired by Beyonce: https://www.tumblr.com/beyoncepalettes
.