Research visuals: all the resources you'll ever need!

If you want to start creating clear and attractive visuals about your research, but don’t know where to start, this page is for you! Here’s a complete overview of tools, resources and inspiration you can use as a starting point for your designs.

Presentation

VIB course:

Doctoral Schools course:

Inspiration for your visuals

Digital tools to create visuals

Inkscape tutorial videos

Photos to use in your visuals

Illustrations and icons to use in visuals

Photos and illustrations (specific themes)

Colour schemes for your visuals

Typography for your visuals

Creating graphs

Creating maps

Books about visuals, infographics and data visualization

  • Data visualisation, Andy Kirk
  • Dear Data, Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec
  • Information graphics, Taschen
  • Infographic designers’ sketchbooks, Steven Heller & Rick Landers
  • Storytelling with data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
  • The visual display of quantitative information, Edward Tufte
  • Trees, maps and theorems, Jean-Luc Doumont
  • Visual journalism, Gestalten
  • Visual thinking, Willemien Brand

People on Twitter talking about infographics and data visualization

Infographic blogs and online magazines

Podcasts on data visualization

Books on a bookshelf - infographics resources

Read more:

thumbnail for video 10 - can you use excel to create a powerful chart

Can you use Excel to create a powerful chart?

Spreadsheet tools such as Microsoft Excel or Numbers might not be the first thing on your mind when considering data visualization tools, but they can be pretty solid choices to build data visuals. Don’t let anyone convince you that using Excel to create data visuals is unprofessional.

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thumbnail for video 09 - choosing the right font for your data visual

Choosing the right font for your data visual

Fonts evoke emotions: there are very sophisticated fonts, playful fonts, attention-grabbing fonts, and elegant handwritten fonts. Using the wrong type of font can have a lot of impact. In data visualization the implications of typography are mainly focused on readability. Labels and annotations can easily become so small they get hard to read. Above all else, we should choose a font which is readable at small sizes.

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thumbnail for video 08 - three roles of colour in a data visual

Three roles of colour in a data visual

Colour is one of the most crucial tools we have to turn a normal chart into a powerful chart with a clear message, a chart which tells a story rather than simply presenting the information.

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thumbnail for video 07 - 7 different goals for your chart

7 different goals for your chart

A crucial step in building a powerful chart is choosing the right type of chart. A lot of charts don’t work because they simply use the wrong type of chart. To avoid this trap, we must ask ourselves a basic question: what’s the ultimate goal of our data visual? What do we want to show with our data?

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thumbnail for video 06 - making a data visual noise-free

Making a data visual noise-free

Removing noise from a data visual is not only about taking things away such as gridlines, axes or legends. That’s just one part of it, which we could call removing physical noise. Improving the signal-to-noise ratio is often also about adding little things that help our audience better understand the visual. We are helping them by removing mental noise, or mental barriers.

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Three tips to create powerful charts in Excel

Creating charts in Excel can be a very powerful tool for making sense of complex data sets, and for visualizing them. But the default options are not always the most pretty or effective ones. Here are our top three tips to create better Excel charts.

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We are really into visual communication!

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