PLOS Computational Biology: Ten Rules for Better Figures

A new article in PLOS Computational Biology presents 10 simple rules for better scientific figures:

1. Know your audience
2. Identify your message
3. Adapt the figure to the support medium
4. Captions are not optional
5. Do not trust the defaults
6. Use color effectively
7. Do not mislead the reader
8. Avoid "chartjunk"
9. Message trumps beauty
10. Get the right tool

The whole article is worth reading. The authors highlight a few "right tools", including MatPlotLib, R, Inkscape, GIMP, TikZ and PGF, ImageMagick, D3.js, Cytoscape, and Circos. Furthermore, they give excellent examples of both good and bad figures with accompanying information on how the figures were created.

Note our tutorials on the R graphing package ggplot2, Inkscape and GIMP.