Styling Guidelines

Internally, we define default visual standards for plots and figures. The main goals are:

• clarity – figures should be easy to interpret
• consistency – plots should look coherent across projects
• reproducibility – formatting choices should be deliberate and documented
• publication-readiness – figures should scale cleanly from reports to journal submissions

These recommendations aim to encourage good habits in everyday work and to reduce last-minute figure reformatting when preparing publications.

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General plotting guidelines

• Use a sans-serif font type.
  Fonts like Arial or Helvetica are easier to read and are usually the font of choice for labels and annotations.

• Use standard journal column widths.
  When preparing figures for scientific publications using standard widths (e.g. single or double column) is critical to make decisions on font size and aspect ratio.

  • Single-column: 89 mm
  • Two-column: 183 mm

• Use an appropriate font size.
  Everything smaller than 7pt this is usually too small for axis labels, tick labels, and legend text.

• Use a neutral background.
  Usually a white or transparent background is best when exporting PNGs (e.g., for slides).

• Avoid using borders and frames.
  Unless they are needed for clarity.

• Use 4–6 tick labels or less.
  More ticks reduce clarity and add unnecessary detail.

• Use detailed captions.
  The figure and caption should be understandable without referring back to the main text.

ImportantThings to avoid

• Avoid pie charts.
  Bar charts usually communicate the same information more clearly and comparably.

• Avoid 3D charts.
  When rendered in 2D (e.g., in papers or slides), 3D visualizations are hard to read and can introduce ambiguity.

• Avoid gridlines by default.
  Gridlines were historically used to assist manual interpretation.
  In modern workflows, it is better to:

  • share the underlying dataset, and
    
  • add gridlines only if they improve interpretability.