Biology is a visually grounded scientific discipline—from the way data is collected and analyzed to the manner in which the results are communicated to others. Visualization methods have advanced greatly from the hand-drawn pictures found in scientific publications before the twentieth century and now rely almost exclusively on computer-based visualization tools.

From this blog I have always advocated about requirement of better visualization practices for the scientific community. Currently there are too many visualization tools available to biologists working with genomes, alignments and phylogenies, macromolecular structures, images and systems biology data. Some of them are reasonably good but most of them are really absurd. In my humble opinion the whole notion  of visual representation is turned into unnecessery creativity. You can think of unnecessery creativity as abstract art, everyone like it but no one understand it. My point is with very few exceptions scientists don’t need fancy visualization tools but they do require functional visualization tools. What they really require is familiarity and functional understanding with fundamental aspects of visual presentation.  Most of scientists are trapped in a vicious circle of bar and pie charts  and they have irresistible fascination with those default colors and shapes. The same applies to advanced visualization tools created for different types of biological data. Take a exmple of Genome browser there are plenty of them but there’s no one to use them. A big WHY? They are inspired by the irresistible fascination of fancy interface design and a lack of functional problem solving approach makes it more difficult.

Recently Nature Methods started a new column, ‘Points of View’ authored by Bang Wong which deals with these fundamental aspects of visual presentation. Each month Wong will focus on a particular aspect of data presentation or visualization and provide easy-to-apply tips on how to overcome common pitfalls. I think this is an interesting initiative and in coming days scientific community will be benefited with these useful tips. In his very first column Bang, who is creative director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, has written about importance of color coding – a topic which was covered sometime back on this blog and also on the blog of  data geek  Michael Driscoll.  Michael has called color as the cinderella of data visualization. In Bang’s words

Color is a familiar and widely used design element. Poor color choices can introduce bias and unwanted artifacts into our presentations. Careful consideration when choosing colors will help us make the most of the communication and enable readers to discern the encoded information.

There is plenty of evidence that suggests that articles with better visual appeal always attract a better citation. I think this kind of focused columns can be good starting point if you want to get serious and real about your visual presentation that is not just limited to articles published in journals. These basics principles are applicable everywhere even when you are preparing a poster or power point presentation.

Suggested readings:

The nature of color and How we perceive color?