Making Science Beautiful

Another reason for this site’s existence is that something people do not always tell you is this: as a researcher, you are also going to need to create and design, recreate, and design some more.

For me, this is something I love.

One of the things I would like to share on this platform is some of my creations. I love making science beautiful. I can really see how I have embraced my own creative style over the years. Whether it is through posters, presentations, illustrations, extension material, websites, or small visual details that help communicate an idea more clearly, design has become part of how I work.

There are so many different types of design in our roles as knowledge workers, a term for academics I have learnt from a book I have been reading, “How to be a Happy Academic”. We design posters and presentations for conferences and symposia. We create promotional material for open days, farmer information days, and extension events. We prepare lecture slides, teaching resources, reports, diagrams, and sometimes even websites in various formats, whether that is GitHub, Notion, Google Sites, or something else entirely.

With cameras on our phones, design and creation have also become more accessible. Not necessarily easier, because good design still takes thought, time, and care, but more possible. We can take beautiful pictures, contextualised pictures, landscape and portrait images, close-up and far-away shots, macro photographs, field photographs, silly moments, serious moments, and everything in between.

I think it is worth taking the time to capture these things, and capturing them well. Pause, take the picture. Take in the context. Capture the close-up. Take the photo of the field, the people, the disease symptoms, the trial, the process, and the moment. Then make a space to save your images, preferably in a common or organised space, because over time you build a treasure trove that you can return to for future work.

Since last year, I have also really been enjoying the fact that I can now co-create images with ChatGPT. This is something I would not have been able to do before without access to a graphic designer, which I unfortunately would not have been able to afford, though that would have been amazing too! For me, this has opened up a new way of creating visual material that feels more personal, more accessible, and more aligned with how I want to communicate science.

Professor Emerson Del Ponte, my co-supervisor from Universidade Federal de Viçosa (UFV) in Brazil, taught me about sharing my work through the Open Science Framework. I have been keeping everything from research compendia to conference posters and presentations there. Maybe no one will ever look at them again, but they are still useful. They give me a DOI with a findable URL for QR codes and also for my CV, they make the work more findable, and they also become a reference point for myself when I want to return to something I have already created.

So, this part of the website is also about that: the creative side of knowledge work. The part where we design, make, arrange, capture, communicate, and try to make knowledge not only accurate, but also accessible and beautiful. I will also reflect on my creations and designs over time. I have found this a useful instructional tool in my supervision.

Posted: 13 June 2026