One year of PaperPict: what we learned about figures
Eleven months, six tools, and a lot of figures. Some of what we learned we expected. Some of it we didn't.
Read article →Where the palettes come from
Nature, Science, NEJM, Lancet, and JAMA each have a house style visible across thousands of published figures: a handful of saturated hues, consistent tints, and neutral greys. The R package ggsci documented these sets for plots; we extended the same colours to illustrations so a mechanism diagram and its accompanying chart share a palette.
Why a palette is more than colours
A palette in PaperPict is five base colours, three tint levels each, and rules for what gets which role: primary entities take base colours, membranes and compartments take light tints, and arrows stay ink. Applying a palette therefore changes the whole figure coherently rather than recolouring shapes at random.
Switching without redrawing
Because every element carries a role rather than a fixed colour, switching from Nature to Lancet is a single change. The same figure can be submitted to a second journal after a rejection with the palette swapped and nothing else touched.
Okabe-Ito is the safe default
When in doubt, choose Okabe-Ito. It was designed so that all colours remain distinguishable for people with the common forms of colour vision deficiency and it is recommended by several publishers. We ship it alongside the journal sets and suggest it whenever a figure encodes categories by colour alone.
Custom palettes for labs
Lab plans can define their own set — the group's colours for a recurring cell type or treatment arm — and apply it to every figure the lab makes. Consistency across a thesis or a series of papers is the point.
