Blog on science communication

A poster presentation is a dance. A dance in which you start off by yourself, scanning the crowd for a nice partner to dance with. Then, you have to attract that partner and invite them to join your dance.

Do you want to create professional posters, presentations, websites, invitations, or reports? Then you need the tools and resources to design better. We’ve compiled a list of our favorite design tools and resources.

Giving a poster presentation is not the dream of every scientist, but we help you to make a beautiful and effective poster presentation to take advantage of the networking opportunity!

Floor did a science communication internship at The Online Scientist and wrote a report about the process. In this article she shares the 7 lessons she learned while working with us.

To make sure that people book your (online) course, your landing page needs to provide all the necessary information. Answer these questions to create a compelling and informative page for both online and physical courses.

Scrollytelling is a relatively new storytelling technique that combines the power of storytelling with the convenience of scrolling. It is an engaging and interactive way to tell stories that captures the attention of readers and a great tool for creative science communication.

Creating a graphical abstract is a great way to help you communicate your research visually. To create an effective graphical abstract follow our extensive guide with tips and case studies.

It’s our mission to create better science communication through design, so we’ve summarized some lessons from our Design crash course for scientist to help you become a better designer.

Content design is essential for making your text easier to read. It’s the starting point for any designers, and can be used by all researchers instantly. So take advantage of our tips on how to design your text and create happy readers.

There are many styles you can choose from when you design infographics. 3D isometric, illustration, icon, or flat design. But what style to choose? We’ll show you some styles from our portfolio to get inspired.

How can you make your workshops a success? If you're the organizer it helps to think about the trade-offs in time, interactivity and the number of participants. We'll help you choose the right workshop for your wishes.

Do you want to look professional on the profile page of your university website, research page, or LinkedIn page? That means you need to have a good profile picture. We give you the tips to create a great profile picture with your mobile phone.

Are you dreading writing a bio for your website or LinkedIn page? Don't worry, we'll help you write an effective bio that is fun to read and you are proud to share with the world!

We encounter them too often: unattractive team pages with holiday snapshots and boring bios. But your researchers are doing all the work, so we say it’s about time to put them in the spotlight they deserve! With this guide, we will help you take better profile pictures, design an attractive team page, and write interesting [...]

Vague websites with hidden menus, confusing sliders, irrelevant stock photography and long texts that no one wants to read… And many websites are stuck in the 90s with introductions such as “Welcome to our website”. We think you can do better! We’ll share our best practices so you can make your website & homepage useful [...]

When you start thinking about doing science communication, one of the first things to come up is your target audience – in fact, it’s right in the beginning of our Basics of Science Communication workshop! But deciding on that audience can be tricky. In this blog, we’ll discuss the essential question you need to ask [...]

A good EU project website is an excellent way of showcasing your work. We have collected some best practices to help you create better, more beautiful and user-friendly websites.

Your research website is not about you Most subsidies require that you create a website about your project. But who are you making it for? Spoiler: it's not the subsidizer. It's not even you or your consortium. It's the general public and other stakeholders of your project! Unfortunately, most research websites are still obligatory monstrosities [...]

You have a presentation scheduled in Zoom – a common sight since 2020! Use these tips and tricks to avoid the most common blunders when presenting in Zoom.

Here you are, expert in your academic field. And you have found equally qualified partners to create a consortium around a really exciting piece of research. You have everything settled and your research budget is excellent. The project proposal is almost done! But then you realize you have this damned obligatory communication section to add [...]

Let’s say you’re approached by a journalist working on a story, and he or she asks you to talk about your research. What is the single most important thing to keep in mind if you want to be realistic and fair? Spoiler alert: it’s not about jargon… No, the main issue to keep in mind [...]

What can you do to make your research stand out from the crowd? As science communicators in an online world, we have compiled the five most efficient ways to become more visible to journalists, colleagues, conference organizers and funding agencies. Have you ever Googled yourself, only to find an outdated article or forum comment from [...]

Research is slowly moving into the real world, with studies being done using data from social media websites and interaction with the public. But what do you do when you need to cite someone’s tweet? How do you cite a Facebook post in your journal article? Is it enough to give the URL? We’ve compiled [...]

Finding a new hosting provider for your website can be very frustrating; online you find good and bad reviews, you never quite know what a hosting provider does for you, and maybe you lack the technical know-how to assess if they offer enough service for a safe and speedy website. We help you to avoid [...]

"I want a logo!” With these words every logo design process starts. But this isn't enough for a designer to develop the new logo for your website. It helps to know what type of logo you want, or, at least, what your preferences are. Here you find the different styles of logos so you can [...]

Before building a website we advise you to think about why you need a site, who your audience is, and what goals you want to achieve. We developed this website optimizer to help us understand your goals and wishes for your new website and to manage expectations. Please fill out this optimizer for your project [...]

When you are thinking about developing an e-learning course, it’s good practice to think about the purpose, your target audience, and the learning goals before you start. For this purpose we developed the e-learning optimizer that helps you to discover what you need before you start building an online tool. It helps you to define [...]

If you read our blogs, you’ll notice that we talk a lot about making whatever you publish about science easy to understand. This may feel repetitive sometimes. And being scientists ourselves we get why you may think it’s the least important part of any presentation. But science communication is here to stay, so it pays [...]

We wrote the title with the word ‘slides’. Yes, slides. Because let’s get one thing clear first; the fact that we dislike so many presentations is not because presentations or slides are bad. What’s often wrong is the execution of the presentation. People are very visual, so a combination of a story with images works [...]

You have been invited to a well-known international conference to give a presentation – what an honour! Your first thought may be to get started right away by copying graphs from your publications into a slide, or dragging and dropping content from your archive of premade slides and clip-art into an empty presentation… Don’t open [...]

You’ve probably seen them in , those horribly designed evidence pyramids. We think they deserved an update! So instead of using random designs from Google images, get our pyramid to save your audience from bad design headaches. We have nightmares from these ugly pyramids! Download your Levels of Evidence Pyramid Feel free to use this [...]