How to communicate science visually
Sometimes color helps. Sometimes it just gets in the way.That’s just one example of the lack of simple prescriptions for how to use visual materials to clearly communicate scientific concepts or research results. It all depends on the particulars, Felice Frankel explains patiently in seminars at MIT and in her new book, “Visual Strategies,” published this fall by Yale University Press.For example, in one of Frankel’s most famous images — which ended up gracing the cover of the journal Science — her key decision was to add color to the water in an image originally produced in a single tone. The image illustrated a way of confining droplets of liquid so that, even when their edges were touching, there was no leakage from one to the next. The colorless version showed the droplets, but didn’t communicate the essence of what was going on: the total absence of seepage between...