This document provides guidance on creating effective figures and plots for proposals and presentations. It includes dos and don'ts for the preliminary results section, as well as tips for line plots, scatter plots, bar plots, pie charts, color choice, and figure creation tools. Key recommendations include using color contrasts that print clearly in black and white, emphasizing important information without artifacts, and avoiding default Excel plots.

1. Proposal:
Preliminary Results and Discussion

2. Do Don’t
 Include initial results if you have
them
 You can also conduct and report
on informal pilot studies
 Anticipate results
 Maybe make graphs to show
potential relationships
 Potentially include results from a
related project
 And discuss how your results may
be the same or differ
 Write text before citing figure
 Write captions for each figure
 Insert figures without
explanatory text or captions
 Leave this section blank
because you have not yet
generated formal results
Dos and Don’ts

3. 1. Don’t use default Excel plots!
2. Figure should highlight the key relationships in the data.
3. Should be clear - no extraneous legends, lines, only use annotations
when they add real explanatory value.
4. Don’t use bells and whistles like 3-D when they don’t improve clarity.
5. Make sure fonts are large enough to be read both in print and on
screen.
Making effective plots

4. 0
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.05
0.06
0.07
0.08
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Tap
Pur
Brita
What’s wrong here?
Line plots

5. 0
0.02
0.04
0.06
0.08
0 2 4 6 8
Concentration
(mg/l)
Week
Tap
Pur
Brita
Chart for presentation
Line plots

6. 0
0.02
0.04
0.06
0.08
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Concentration
(mg/l)
Week
Tap
Pur
Brita
Line plots
Chart for a paper

7. For presentations, use color, make thick lines, larger fonts
Line plots

8. What’s wrong with this graph?
Scatter plots

9. What’s wrong with this graph?
Scatter plots
Lines too thin
Symbols pretty small
Axis labels too small, not
uniform size
Poor choice of axis scales
Zero onY-axis is off graph
origin

10. Improvements:
Lines thicker
Symbols bigger
Axis bigger font, bold,
uniform
Axis scales match data
range, changed to log
scales
Added regression line and
equation
Y = 0.97X + 0.10, R2 = 0.745, n = 145
Scatter plots

11. Bar plots
What’s wrong here?

12. 0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
Day1 Day 20
Tap water
New Omni Filter
Old Omni Filter
Bar plots
What’s wrong here?

13. - Appropriate for counts without
variation
- Emphasis on comparing means
- Error bars show some variation (if
included)
- Shows rough distribution of data,
including outliers
- Conveys much more information in
same amount of space (customizable,
but usually median, quartiles, 95%
range, outliers)
Bar plots & box plots

14. The much-abused Pie Graph
(try to avoid them)
(consider (stacked) bar graphs)
Fonts too small
Bad color choices: slices not
distinguished by shading
Too many data groups (categories)
Pie chart

15. Improvements:
Combined categories
Better shading / color scheme
Enlarged fonts
Unboxed the legend (remove
excess ink)
Pie chart

16. Pie chart
What’s wrong here?

17. What is effective from these variations?

18. Use diagrams and cartoons to illustrate concepts
and describe methods
Diagrams and cartoons

19. Diagrams and cartoons
Use diagrams and cartoons to illustrate concepts
and describe methods

20. Bamber et al., 2000 National Geographic, 2002
Important information should be emphasized, but the colorscale should
not introduce artifacts into visual perception of the data
Choice of color

21. 1. If you use colors, try to use high contrasts that are still useful if printed
in black and white
2. Be aware of how your color choices look to someone who is color blind
Normal Color Blind
Choice of color

22. 1. Excel (don’t use the default!)
2. Computational environments: Matlab, python
(Matplotlib), R, …
3. Vector graphics: Adobe illustrator, Inkscape, …
4. Earth science specific tools: GMT, GeoMapApp, m_map
(for matlab), …
Tools to make good figures

23. Excel Python
Adobe Illustrator GMT