Library of Science and Medical Illustrations

By

somersault18:24

Leverage your science communication today

Scientific studies demonstrate that we recall about 10% of oral communicated information after 3 days. 

That is scary isn't it? Only 10% of what you say will be remembered.

But there is good news too: if you complement your oral information with visuals, the retention rate increases to 65% and more.

Of course, the visuals have to be relevant and clear. They have to truly complement what you are saying.

For many scientists, teachers and students that is exactly the problem. It is not an easy task to generate all the time effective visuals.

It takes a lot of time - that we don’t have

It takes skill - that not everybody has

It takes discipline and willpower to create a professional style

To help you and make the process of effective science communication easier for you we’ve created this library of science and medical illustrations. It is especially built to facilitate easy generation of visual content for the scientific community.

It consists of a collection of ready-to-use science illustrations in 5 different color schemes. 

All images have a transparent background, that allows easy integration in, for example, Powerpoint presentations. 

This tool is meant to help scientists, teachers and students to create easy to understand figures for posters and/or presentations without losing their valuable time. This improves their communication skills and interaction with students and other members of the scientific community.

The library also includes several ready-to-use Powerpoint slides optimized for clear and effective communication. We maximized the signal to noise ratio in these slides to convey a message in the most effective way.

If you want to explore the library before you download, just go here, it will give you a good idea about the content, the style and the quality.

If this is for you, grab your library right away, but I would appreciate if you can read this first: 

It is a pay-what-you-want product. We've created it for everybody, regardless of your financial situation. We believe our content should be shared and spread freely. If you can’t afford it, take it now and chip in later when you can (just enter '0' in the price field when you hit the donate button). If your financial situation allows you to contribute you’re helping others to get access to this material that normally couldn’t afford it. Scientific clipart libraries of this quality and volume often sell for 50-75 euros. However, in this case you decide yourself how much you can afford.

If you decide to contribute, we'd like you to know that we invest the money in more educative and helpful resources for scientists, teachers and students. We will publish all these resources on our website, so stay tuned. Many more things to come.

Thanks a lot in advance, you all rock!

Idoya & Luk 

"As a high school biotechnology teacher, I use the somersault images on everything from student handouts and lab directions to PowerPoint presentations. They are just detailed enough to be immediately recognizable, but not so elaborate that I can't use my own labeling without looking too busy. I love that they offer the images in several different colors; this is so helpful in directing student attention to a specific part of a bigger picture. Images of larger systems are broken down into images of each part as well, so you can focus your illustration on whatever you need to without getting bogged down with a complicated image."

- Kathy Savage - Oviedo High School - USA

We use a Creative Commons license for this library (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format (non-commercial)

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material (non-commercial)

For details go here

We also want to thank some people for some of the illustrations:

Detailed C. elegans illustrations: Chris Grove at WormBase.org, California Institute of Technology

DNA visualizations: Graphite Life Explorer

Molecular visualizations: ePMV

Detailed neuron illustrations: Eyewire