a simple guide to making figures that don't suck

Data runs our world and communicating data has a real impact on our daily lives. However, so many of the data visualisations we see are flawed, ineffective, or outright wrong - and this has consequences. But how do you make a good graph?
In this video, I talk through the steps you should take to go from having a dataset, to a complete figure that is simple, uncluttered and accessible. I talk in general terms, though there is a bit of a bias towards the sciences, and this is totally software agnostic (though I do mention common python libraries).
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Gear Used:
Camera: Canon EOS 70D
Lenses: Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 G2
Microphone: Rode NTG2
Images and video from the public domain or from creative commons sources.
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Hi, I'm Thomas, a first year PhD student at Cardiff University. This is my channel where I share my experiences of academia and pieces of Physics and Astronomy I find interesting.
If you enjoy videos from Simon Clark, Dr Becky or Ruby Granger, I think you'll enjoy my videos!

[@danielheltberg6202]

Thanks for the video, Thomas. I've saved it for later for when I have a report to write! It'll come in handy

[@nondairyneutrino]

Love it, I'd love to see more of this "Tips for getting your point across". I know I've seen at least one scientific plot in a physics talk that just made my eyes glaze over and think "I can't understand a single thing this plot is trying to convey". I always try to keep in mind color-blind-friendly choices but wasn't aware there are specific gradients that address just that! Another favorite is to switch or combo e.g. line dashing with color.

[@ThomasRintoul]

Yeah there are so many people who either don't bother, or don't think to think about it cause they just don't know. Trying to keep my plots accessible is such a priority for me. I've known so many amazing scientists who have really struggled because people don't put in the bare minimum effort to make their stuff accessible. Also yeah, line styles and line markers are things I didn't even touch on in this video but they're great for line graphs. I'm working on a figure at the minute that needs 4 lines - 2 of which represent magnetic fields, 2 have no magnetic fields. And within each of those I have one low res and one high res simulation. So linestyles, different markers and colours are the mood. Blue and squares for magnetic. Orange and circles for non-magnetic. Solid for low res. Dashed for high res

[@PeterReidUK]

Great video as always Thomas, talking about one of my pet peeves, and how to address it!

[@ThomasRintoul]

Yeah it's such an easy thing to get right as well. I think that there's a certain tendency for people who are really good scientists, to be really terrible communicators and to just want tell everyone everything all at once with all the data, and when they do that you just get an inaccessible mess

[@meaganhough535]

This is SUCH a pet peeve of mine; great tips!

[@ThomasRintoul]

I share your pain if you hadn't got that from the video. It might just be me, but I find that the good perceptually uniform colour maps (e.g. inferno and magma) look better than the dumpster fire that is Jet anyway. There's no good reason not to make stuff accessible