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Software

• You already know what Excel is, but perhaps you were not yet aware that it can be used to make shockingly gorgeous graphs these days. (But Excel’s defaults are often terrible!)
• Tableau is a point-and-click program like Excel, but its default graphs look much prettier. This software is horrendously expensive but you can use it for free while you are a student. Tableau is mainly used by corporate folks and professional data visualizers, but don’t let the lack of scientific examples fool you—this software can make great figures that will be appropriate for your manuscripts.
• Then there are lesser-known point-and-click programs that make gorgeous graphics and are completely free: Data Illustrator, RAWGraphs, and the public version of Flourish.
• Adobe Illustrator is expensive and has a ton of features you do not need. Affinity Designer is an affordable alternative that will let you do everything you’re used to doing in Illustrator. (Its sister software Affinity Photo also makes a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop.)
• InkScape is a completely free, open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer, but has a steep learning curve whereas Affinity Designer is very easy to use if you already know Illustrator.
• Paleontological Statistics (PAST) provides a point-and-click interface for generating many kinds of graphs, including multivariate graphs (PCA, NMDS, etc.).
• Here are instructions for making a hexagonal heatmap in ggplot2.

Other links

• Paul Tol’s color palettes – a must-have!
• The viridis multi-hue color palettes
• ggplot2, the gold standard for coding up graphs
• I recommend this free, open-access book about graphing scientific data
• Pilestone and Coblis allow you to see how your figures will look to someone with colorblindness—note that larger images take far longer to process, so it’s best to submit a low-resolution, low-quality version of your graph
• If you’re looking for insect icons and silhouettes to adorn your graphs, check out BioRender, PhyloPic, and the Noun Project

Slides

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