Inkscape is the most similar to Adobe Illustrator out of the three options for drawing your own figure discussed in this post. It took some playing around to figure out all the settings and tool options, but I found Vectr to be fairly intuitive and I was making figures quickly. Layers are useful for drawing figures with lots of elements. Vectr has layers, which let you lock and hide individual vectors (shapes defined by 2D points connected by lines and curves) that you’ve drawn. There’s both a web and a desktop version of this software. Vectr is like a pared down version of Adobe Illustrator. However, it has a limited number of drawing tools, so it’s harder to draw intricate figures, like a brain or a mouse. Its ease of use is one of the reasons why this was the first program I used to create graphics for the Addgene blog. Since it’s web-based, you could access it from anywhere. It’s part of Google Drive so it has a similar interface as Google Docs or other products in the suite. Google Drawings is similar to using PowerPoint to draw figures. If you want to draw your own figures Google Drawings This post highlights several of these free tools which will hopefully also help you communicate your science, whether it’s in presentations, manuscripts, or social media. But with a little Googling and some trial and error, I found some free design software that let me create graphics that better communicated the science in my blog posts.
Initially I didn’t have access to professional-grade design software, like Adobe Illustrator, and I didn’t want to pay for these programs either. Since then I’ve realized my figures are just as important, if not more important, than my writing. Creating graphics were usually the last thing I thought about when writing posts. When I started writing for the Addgene blog, I was focused on writing about new scientific techniques and cool plasmids.
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