You don't have to be an artist to make your science look good (& resources galore!)

Back in the dark ages (2017), I published an entire series on how to ethically find, use, and commission list of image and icon sources for popular and technical communication about science, including one article dedicated to useful and ethically available sources of images.

Human-produced resources for scicomm and academic/ac-adjacent scientific communication have proliferated in the past decade, so here's a list of a bunch more! These are all non-AI sources, to the best of my knowledge.

Science-specific

• IAN images (like what I used/modified for this American Scientist article)

• BioRender - amazing, extensive and expensive (alternatives/comparison discussed here)

• https://www.phylopic.org/

• https://scidraw.io/

• https://innovativegenomics.org/glossary/

• SMART (Servier Medical Art) – 3000 free medical images

• Public Health Image Library: https://phil.cdc.gov/

• https://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/

• http://www.freenatureimages.eu/

• https://www.somersault1824.com/science-illustrations/

• https://mindthegraph.com/

• Megahn Wise’s climate health care icons (See specifically “care-based climate health icons” on the linked page.)

• Arcadia science's research species illustration library

• https://iconarray.com/ - generates population-subpopulation comparison arrays (icons are people)

Double-checking your images are color-blind friendly*

• https://coolors.co/ helps you identify color palettes you can standardize across all graphics and figures.

• https://www.colororacle.org/ and https://bioapps.byu.edu/colorblind_image_tester let you upload your images and check for accessibility to several kinds of color blindness.

• http://colorbrewer2.org/ helps you identify three types of color ranges/combos (sequential, divergent, categorical) with color values that work for various types of colorblindness.

• Chroma lets you build on Color Brewer's "start" and "end" colors to customize your whole color range.

Additional resources

• Great overview of other websites that are useful, including how to create graphics of diverse people

• Listing of other possible image sources for science (seems biomed focused)

• Other image sources with viable science options (depending on what you need; can be stereotypical and/or limited to certain disciplines):

  • PowerPoint's own Icons and SmartArt tools options

  • https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/public-domain/

• Some of Getty's massive image database is free - you might have to do a little tweaking to search terms and filters to find relevant material, but it's usually very high quality.

• Pixabay sometimes (stock image site) - you'll be looking for vectors if you want a transparent background. Illustrations might help, too, but you'll probably need to use another app/program to remove the background from those.

• The Noun Project describes itself as "The world’s largest and most diverse collection of high-quality vector icons and photos. Crafted and curated by real human Creators" and offers nearly 10 million free icons.

• Jordan Acosta's curated list of non-AI image sources for writers is great for talks, op-eds, blog posts/newsletters, etc.

How about you?

What are some of your favorite sources for images to share science?

*Edited 14 July 2025 to add color-related resources.

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