resources
Find these useful.
presentations
Let me tell you about something.
lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
design + visualization
EMBO Journal 2011 Cover Contest
non-scientific image entry - fiber optics - honourable mention
For the EMBO Journal 2011 Cover Contest, I prepared two entries, one for the scientific category and one for the non-scientific category.
About the EMBO Journal Cover Contest
The EMBO Journal non-scientific cover prize is awarded for the most interesting and beautiful image made outside the lab. Contestants may submit, for example, photos or artistic impressions of wildlife animals, plants or landscapes. Particularly welcome will also be hand or computer-generated paintings or drawings (or photographs of other works of art) related to a biological or molecular biological topic.
The EMBO Journal scientific cover prize is awarded for the most captivating and thought-provoking contribution depicting a piece of molecular biology research. Entries can include light or electron micrographs, 3D reconstructions or models of biological specimen or molecules, spectacular artefacts collected in the lab, original new views of lab equipment (but not of colleagues!), or other research-based images to be of interest to molecular biologists.
2011 Contest and Image Status
The 2011 winners have been announced. The scientific image winner was Heiti Paves, who submitted a confocal image of an Arabidopsis thaliana anther filled with pollen grains. The non-scientific winner was Dieter Lampl, with his "Blue Ice" photo — a glacier in Los Glaciares National Park in Patagonia.
My non-scientific entry (photo of fiber optics) received honourable mention and was included in the Favourites of the Jury gallery.
non-scientific image entry - fiber Optics
My non-scientific entry was an abstract image photo of fiber optics. It received honourable mention and were included in the Favourites of the Jury gallery.
The motivation and technical details behind these photos are described here.
The other entry, a scientific image, was an information graphic showing a hive panel of genomic annotations in human, mouse and dog genomes, based on the use of the newly introduced hive plot.
My submission of a large Circos figure for its cover (see right), which was originally designed for a poster that introduced Circos, was awarded the 2010 EMBO Journal best scientific cover prize.
entry details
Some time ago, I did a personal project of photos of fiber optic strands. These worked out well. I had not done anything with these images, and thought they would make a competitive entry into the cover contest.
I revisited the fiber optic lamp with a higher resolution camera (Canon 5D — original images were from a Canon 20D) and a dedicated macro lens (Sigma 150mm f2.8 EX APO DG HSM Macro) (original images were shot with the Canon EF 24-70L).
From these new images, shown below, I created five EMBO Journal cover submissions.
The submissions would render on the cover as shown below.
2011 EMBO Journal cover contest — fiber optic lamp submission images
news + thoughts
Choosing Plotting Symbols
In this months column, Bang and I consider how to choose effective plotting symbols in the Points of View column Plotting Symbols.
Choose symbols that overlap without ambiguity and communicate relationships in data.
Figure Design and Writing — Two Goals, One Process
This month I look at how creating effective figures is similar to the process of writing well in the Points of View column Elements of Visual Style.
Using Strunk's Elements of Style as an example of writing guidelines, I look how these can be translated to creating figures.
I value
