February 4, 2018

R.T. Thomason, Ph.D., Figure Editor

Wow! We are already the beginning of February, hard to believe 2018 is in full swing. I’ve been working hard on a large center NIH proposal which is almost out the door. I thought I would dedicate this blog to discussing some thoughts when writing large proposals (which is directly linked to writing and formatting manuscripts). I had the unique opportunity to work with a graphic designer (who is not a trained scientist, per se, but works with scientists for most the most part) as we were putting together the proposal. The main thing I noticed is that the graphics editor kept things simple. At first, I thought “these figures are way too simple! The reviewers are going to laugh!” but after we placed them in the document and I saw how they gelled with the text, they began to grow on me. And honestly, having all figures that matched in color palette, graphics, fonts, etc., makes a world of difference for readability for a document. That comes back to most important thing to think about [channeling a blog post from a few months ago…] KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE! (I know I am possibly wearing that phrase out, but it is so important and needs to be repeated).

 

We will continue with some New Year resolutions next time on It Figures…