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

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.

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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