Núria Taberner, Ph.D.

The auditorium of TU Delft was filled with my co-workers, my parents and friends who had travelled from Spain for my PhD defence, all dressed with their best suits. I had managed to answer the objections from the toga dressed jury members to get them “satisfied” in the allocated time. It was the moment of my supervisors speech before she handles me the diploma roll and we can all party.

I’m sure she said good things, but criticism always sticks the most. Not the exact words, but the meaning.
It took Núria 6 years to complete the PhD. She helped move the lab two times and didn’t complain. She also spent extra time doing cover illustrations for other unit members and a decorative column on our old building. Interestingly, for her PhD book cover she asked her brother to make the image.

As a scientist, I always struggled finding good reasons to allocate time to making good figures. I should focus on the science. I saw my supervisors getting frustrated with me taking too long crafting a graph, choosing the best colours, the font or the order of elements. It all matters. However, they wanted me to be faster. They were right. My time as a PhD student or Postdoc could be more efficiently placed in the lab.

Nevertheless, the importance of design in scientific communication cannot be undermined. Good design facilitates engagement, comprehension and retention.
I spent 6 years working on a project, learning my system layer by layer, getting deeper and deeper as I read more, as I did more experiments. And now, I want to get an audience to follow me in a 3 page publication or in a 20 minute presentation? I’d better make it easy for them.

I decided to let myself gravitate towards design and doing engaging images, but not for me, for others. So your PhD student or your postdoc can focus on what they are best, The Science.