research-figures

A figure earns its place by making one claim visible faster than the table does. Design from the claim, not from the data: decide what the reader must see, then choose the encoding that shows it.

Rules that apply to every figure

• One claim per figure. If the caption needs "and also", split it.
• Vector output (.pdf for LaTeX, .svg or 300-dpi .png for Word) at the final printed size, so fonts are not scaled. Text width in a typical thesis is about 6 inches (15 cm); set figsize accordingly and never rescale in the document.
• Fonts match the document: same family (or the closest available) and a size between the caption size and the body size (9 to 11 pt at print size). Set once in the style file.
• Colour-blind-safe palette (Okabe-Ito or viridis for sequential data). Never encode a difference by colour alone: vary marker or line style too, and check the figure in greyscale.
• Show variance: error bars, confidence bands, or individual points. State in the caption what the bar is (SD, SEM, 95% CI) and n.
• Direct labels at line ends beat legends when there are fewer than six series.
• Axes start at zero for bar charts; for line charts, start where the data live and say so. Label with quantity and unit. Log scale when the data span orders of magnitude, stated in the label.
• No chartjunk: no 3D, no gradients, no gridlines heavier than the data, no titles inside the figure (the caption is the title).
• Consistency: the same variable has the same colour in every figure of the thesis. Keep a colors dict in the style module.
• Reproducible: every figure comes from a script in figures/src/ that reads the data file and writes the output. No hand-edited figures.

Setup

figures/src/style.py:

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

OKABE_ITO = ["#0072B2", "#E69F00", "#009E73", "#D55E00", "#CC79A7", "#56B4E9", "#F0E442", "#000000"]
COLORS = {"baseline": OKABE_ITO[0], "ours": OKABE_ITO[3]}   # one entry per named series, thesis-wide

def use_thesis_style(text_width_in=6.0, ratio=0.6):
    mpl.rcParams.update({
        "figure.figsize": (text_width_in, text_width_in * ratio),
        "font.family": "serif", "font.size": 10,
        "axes.labelsize": 10, "axes.titlesize": 10,
        "xtick.labelsize": 9, "ytick.labelsize": 9, "legend.fontsize": 9,
        "axes.prop_cycle": mpl.cycler(color=OKABE_ITO),
        "axes.spines.top": False, "axes.spines.right": False,
        "axes.grid": True, "grid.alpha": 0.3, "grid.linewidth": 0.5,
        "lines.linewidth": 1.5, "lines.markersize": 4,
        "errorbar.capsize": 2,
        "savefig.bbox": "tight", "savefig.pad_inches": 0.02,
        "pdf.fonttype": 42, "ps.fonttype": 42,        # embed TrueType, editable text
        "text.usetex": False,                          # True if the LaTeX toolchain is present
    })