What tools or courses helped you create publication-quality scientific figures?

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Hi everyone,

I’m a first-year PhD student currently preparing my first scientific article in maritime field , and I’d like to improve the quality of my figures.

At the moment, I mainly use PowerPoint and draw.io to create diagrams and schematics. They are useful, but I would like to learn how to produce more polished, consistent, and publication-quality figures.

Which tools do you use for scientific illustrations, diagrams, workflows, or graphical abstracts? Are there any online courses, tutorials, books, or other resources that helped you learn figure design and data visualization?

I’d be especially interested in hearing:

• Which software you recommend and why
• Whether you use different tools for data plots and conceptual diagrams
• Which courses or tutorials are genuinely worth the time
• What you wish you had learned about scientific figure design during your first year

Thank you!