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Where can I find a job as an illustrator?

Please help me find graphic designers who specialize in scientific figures.

  • I'm a Ph.D. student who knows how important it is to have great graphics for scientific papers, posters, and job talks. Good scientists don't just come up with results, they present the results in ways that inspire, educate, and amaze others. I'm looking to find contract graphic designers who specialize in scientific work. Searching Google has come up mostly empty: I have found scientific illustrators (i.e. drawings for textbooks), and scientific animators (who do not specialize in 2D journal figures in the standard data software). I'd like to find a designer who can work in MATLAB and Adobe Illustrator, which are the mainly used software suites in my field. I'd like someone to help me design and execute figures and also spruce up my presentations -- mostly 2D still images based on data, and occasional videos. The goal are the types of figures that get published in the journals Science and Nature and can spread a scientific idea. This is for one-off, repeated contract work with deadlines over a few weeks and a decent amount of brainstorming and back-and-forth on how to present the data. I'd probably like to spend $3000 or less over a few months. If I one day become a professor, I could hire on a larger scale. I also have a lot of friends and colleagues in my network, who could potentially also hire the designer going forward. Lastly, I can only work with affordable designers at this point, so people just building up their portfolios might be a good match. I'm willing to look nationally and even overseas. Any suggestions about where I might look? Any suggestions for how to go about my search? The answer is not, "Hire a grad student to do it" because I'd like a reliable professional with graphics expertise, and who I can build a relationship with over time. Thanks!

  • Answer:

    Head to your local design schools. I'm in design school right now and I'm constantly getting listserv emails from our career department for projects/contracting/internship, and especially the ones that are paid get snapped up right quick. It's a huge pool of people eager for design work. And you get the added plus of building relationships with good designers early, who will probably stick by you because, hey, you were one of their first clients. (At least that's what I would do.) And please, please, PLEASE, for the sake of all that is good and holy, avoid http://justcreative.com/2009/08/12/the-pros-and-cons-of-spec-work/ all the time, everytime. Do it for your soul.

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I don't know anyone. The pay someone to teach you to do it yourself approach: You might want to consider taking http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses and/or purchase his books.

The Biggest Dreamer

iiniisfree

You might contact http://www.rludwigdesign.com/portfolio/section/scientific_illustration, who does some work for our lab.

Blazecock Pileon

My understanding was that once an author gets their work accepted in a really top-flight journal (e.g. Science, Nature), the journal helps the author to spruce up the figures - it's not in the journal's interest to have shabby pics. So, maybe contact the office of a leading journal in your field and they might be able to point you to some good people?

firesine

Are you sure you need this? Do you have some sort of really unusual kind of data to present? Every scientist I know (which is a large number) makes their own figures in Illustrator. It doesn't take that long to learn it well enough to make your figures look pretty good.

juliapangolin

...and you don't even need expensive software like Illustrator. Mine are all kludged together in an unholy alliance of Inkscape, OpenOffice and gnuplot.

firesine

..it might also be a good place to meet relevant designers who want to do the sort of work you're hiring for!

The Biggest Dreamer

DarlingBri

It's definitely worth learning good design skills and practices for yourself as a PhD student in the sciences. Most of the time, you're going to have to continually modify figures at the behest of your supervisor, editors and collaborators. And figures that works for a paper will probably need some modification to be useful for your presentations. Matlab and Illustrator both can be configured to make beautiful figures with a fairly mellow learning curve- if possible, work in vector formats such as Postscript so that you can edit figures between programs. Maybe you could find a designer that's willing to teach you how to use these programs to make pretty figures? Isecond the recommendation to checking out Edward Tufte's books from the library, and keeping an eye out for figures in papers you read that are effective. These blogs (http://nicefigure.org/ and http://betterposters.blogspot.com/) are worth checking out. I know some Nature journals frequently redesign figures to make them more ascetically pleasing, but you do have to start with a Nature-worthy result which tends to be the tricky part.

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