Welcome to Lesson #5 of the SciComm Society “Making An Impact” email course!

How did it feel to share your SciComm post with a friend or family member? Did you get some helpful feedback? Was it easy to implement their suggestions, or did you struggle with it? Let us know by hitting reply to this email.

In this lesson, we will look at another way of reaching more people with your research and helping your audience learn about it. This week will be all about translating your social media post into an engaging illustration.

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Lesson # 5: Show your SciComm with illustrations and graphics

The idea of creating something visual to represent your SciComm may make you recoil. But don’t worry; you won’t have to actually draw anything. That is unless you want to!

Here, we want to encourage you to think of engaging ways to visualize your research topic. You can go back to your list of key post ideas from week 1 and think about which of these topics you can explain visually.

Now, similar to a graphical abstract for your research paper, help your audience better understand your research with an illustration. Show processes, key players, and main functions of your topic or concept and how they all interact with each other. Use vivid colors to bring the illustration to life, but remember that simplicity is key. So, only show essential players and processes to not overwhelm your audience.

To illustrate your research topic, you can create a graphic, illustration, or infographic. Choose what makes the most sense and feels most comfortable to you.

Use one of these ideas to “show” your science:

  1. Emojis: A very simple way to showcase your research with visuals is with emojis. We recommend that you create a social media post with 5 emojis that relate to your research, accompanied by brief explanations for each of them. You can also create an image only with the emojis (see #3 for a way to do this) and explain them in more depth in the post itself.
  2. BioRender: This tool gives you everything you need to explain your scientific concept visually. BioRender has science-related icons, templates, and workflows for you to put together into a science illustration. Many researchers even use this tool to create graphics for scientific publications (you have to pay for it, though, to use in a journal, but it’s free for web publishing).
  3. Canva: You can easily create graphics with the website Canva. It has templates for social media graphics with sizes appropriate for the various platforms. There are free graphics and photos that you can add to the templates, and boom, you’ve got yourself a SciComm visual.
  4. Collaborate with an artist: If you are not comfortable with drawing or illustrating (that’s probably most of us!), then seek out a collaboration with an artist. Sarah and Justine have both done this throughout our SciComm ventures and have loved the creations that resulted.

Create your social media post

This week’s task is for you to select one of the options above, create an illustration, and post it on social media. Explain the graphic in the post to help your audience understand and learn. Use the hashtag #mySCSimpact so we can see what you came up with!

If you want to share it directly with us, hit reply and send us the link to your post.