You don't have to be an artist to make your science look good (& resources galore!)

Or, to put it plainly: Science clip art abounds...but how d'ya find it?!

The "vectors" search option on Pixabay can be pretty handy for science-related visuals.

While it's important to use ethically sourced (and compensated) images for scicomm and scientific communication, it can be a challenge -- dare I say even stressful -- to actually come up with these images.

Over the years, I've collected a fair pile of options that I usually share with students in my courses. More recently, a colleague asked about advice for developing images that could be used in an infographic or graphical abstract. In other words, this colleague really needed clip art or icon-style images, not photographs.

My colleague doesn't consider themself an artist, and they didn't really have enough time to get up to speed with free or paid illustration software that can be used to generate custom line drawings or silhouette-style images.

The following links are the resources I suggested:

Science-specific:

• IAN images (like what I used/modified for this American Scientist article)

• BioRender - amazing, extensive and expensive (alternatives/comparison discussed here)

• https://www.phylopic.org/

• https://scidraw.io/

• https://innovativegenomics.org/glossary/

• SMART (Servier Medical Art) – 3000 free medical images

• Public Health Image Library: https://phil.cdc.gov/

• https://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/

• http://www.freenatureimages.eu/

• https://www.somersault1824.com/science-illustrations/

• https://mindthegraph.com/

Additional resources:

• Great overview of other websites that are useful, including how to create graphics of diverse people

• Listing of other possible image sources for science (seems biomed focused)

• Other image sources with viable science options (depending on what you need; can be stereotypical and/or limited to certain disciplines):

  • PowerPoint's own Icons and SmartArt tools options

  • https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/public-domain/

• Some of Getty's massive image database is free - you might have to do a little tweaking to search terms and filters to find relevant material, but it's usually very high quality.

• Pixabay sometimes (stock image site) - you'll be looking for vectors if you want a transparent background. Illustrations might help, too, but you'll probably need to use another app/program to remove the background from those.

How about you?

What are some of your favorite sources for images to share science?

---

This is the end of this post. If you see a prompt to subscribe, you're welcome to do so! Your paid subscription helps me allocate time to the resources I share here.

Want to read more?

Subscribe to commnatural.com to keep reading this exclusive post.

Subscribe Now