Prepare your figures in such a way that you can immediately (re) use them in your presentations.

Spend a lot of time on producing high-quality figures. I really mean a lot of time. High-quality figures are invitations to read your paper. Try to give the figure a didactic flavor.

Realize that editors might pick out one of your figures to feature on the cover.

Default setting

Please realize that the default settings for all options (axes thicknesses, line thicknesses, font sizes of caption, font sizes of labels, data symbol sizes, sizes of tick marks, etc., etc.) are always too small in all commercial programs.

Text aspects of figures

Manuscript text referring to figures

In the main text no sentences should appear like “the solid line shows”, or “the dashed line represents …” Just give the message of the figure in the text: “In Fig. 1 we have presented […] As can be seen in this figure, the agreement between theory and experiment is surprisingly good”.

You do not want the reader to continuously look at the figure and come back to the text. The figure-accompanying text and the figure caption are to be read without interruption and without interdependence.

Avoid having additional curves in your figure that are discussed somewhere later in the text. The reader will get confused when he glances over your figure.

Figure captions

Figure captions should always be self-explanatory. Never use in captions sentences like: “See text for explanation”. Figures (captions plus graph) should be intelligible without the necessity of reading the text of the manuscript.

Make immediately clear in a caption whether you are presenting experimental data, theoretical data, or numerical data. If your formatter and style file permit, make the caption stand aside from the text. For instance by using larger left and right margins, and by using a bottom margin for your caption. In addition you can use (consistently) a different font for all of your captions.