Editors' Guide to Illustrating Complex Science Stories
More often than not, science-centric content is complex. Visuals are a powerful tool for helping your audiences make sense of complex stories. In creating or commissioning such visuals, your first instinct may be to simplify the information in order to make it more broadly accessible. Yet simplification may erase the latest key finding, distilling things in a way that doesn’t honor the cool new discovery you’re trying to highlight. I find it more productive to focus on clarifying, not simplifying (with a nod to the designer Nigel Holmes, the author Alberto Cairo, and many others who have spoken and written about this idea).
This chapter for the KSJ Science Editing Handbook (a project of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, supported by the Kavli Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education) is graphics-centric, based on my own experience with input from others on photography, editorial illustration, and motion graphics. I focus on the process of determining when visuals might be a useful addition to a science-centric story, along with tips for producing and editing them.
