In a field in which the communication channels that count - journal articles and grant applications - often have page limits, an illustration can be worth far more than a thousand words. Scientific success requires effective communication, whether with peer reviewers, funding agencies or colleagues. “We jumped on this very, very quickly, and we’ve been using really nothing else since then.” Show, not tell “Everybody was like, oh my God, this is awesome,” Sattler says. Developed in Toronto, Canada, by a start-up of the same name, and launched in 2017, it features an extensive library of scalable ‘icons’ from across the life sciences and medicine researchers can drop these onto a canvas and manipulate them as if they were circles or polygons.įor Sattler, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, that made it possible to quickly illustrate cell-differentiation pathways without having to draw each cell from scratch. BioRender, a web-based tool specifically designed for life-science and medical illustration, is like a feature-lite version of Illustrator. In 2019, a graduate student in Sattler’s laboratory suggested an alternative. “I’m not gonna give the adjective that I really want to say, but they were just really not nice,” Sattler says of the resulting images. But Illustrator is a professional-grade tool with a notoriously steep learning curve, and PowerPoint’s strength is slide shows, not graphic design. Microsoft’s tool for creating and displaying slideshow presentations is one of two popular options for creating scientific illustrations the other is Adobe Illustrator. So, when the time came to document what her team had done for a journal article, Sattler did what her colleagues frequently do: she fired up PowerPoint. But papers still need writing - and illustrating. Like many researchers, Rita Sattler is trained to conduct science, not to draw it.
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