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Elements of visual style

Nature Methods volume 10, page 371 (2013)Cite this article

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Translate the principles of effective writing to the process of figure design.

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Figure 1: A flood of identical symbols triggers semantic satiation, a phenomenon in which overwhelming repetition results in loss of meaning.
Figure 2: Use the simplest visual representation6 for objects and “omit needless words”1.
Figure 3: Objects that interact or share common meaning should be formatted in a similar way that appeals to intuition.

References

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  2. Pinker, S. The Language Instinct (W. Morrow, New York, 1994).

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  3. Tufte, E.R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 2nd edn., 107–121 (Graphic Press, Cheshire, Connecticut, USA, 2001).

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  4. Corneille, P. Horace (http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6939036M/Corneille's_Horace/) line 1648 (Heath, 1904).

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  1. Martin Krzywinski is a staff scientist at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre.,

    Martin Krzywinski

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  1. Martin Krzywinski
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Krzywinski, M. Elements of visual style. Nat Methods 10, 371 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2444

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