Idoya Lahortiga and Luk Cox met as postdocs working in the same lab at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology in Belgium. Both took similar routes through academia finishing, PhD degrees and moving on to postdoc positions. They would then branch out together on a road less travelled founding the science illustration company Somersault18:24. The two scientists turned illustrators and entrepreneurs spoke with Big Bang about leaving academia, the importance of visual communication, and the ups and downs of starting a business.
Cox and Lahortiga had different reasons for leaving academia but shared a supportive PI. They describe their decision to leave and the importance of mentors.
Cox \ “I think I knew it already in my PhD. I didn’t feel any more the ambition to build a career in academia. For me, the obvious other choice was to go to industry, maybe pharma or biotech, but something I also had inside myself was this entrepreneurial gene. The other thing I was exploring at that time was graphics, mainly in 3D modeling. This was in 2008 so you can imagine there’s the first real, very nice Pixar movies and the software became available so you could try this for yourself. I spent basically all my free time on that. Every day I came home from the lab, I got behind my computer and tried to draw things. It was not always science related but eventually I thought maybe I could combine these worlds. I spoke with Jan Cools, my PI at the time, and he was quite enthusiastic.”
Lahortiga \ “There are always people that have a very important role in your life. And I think Cools was one of those for both of us. He allowed us to explore other fields while still having a fixed salary and the position in the lab. He was also the editor of a journal so one of our first drawings we prepared was for his journal. He gave us this opportunity.”
The decision to leave academia was more difficult for Lahortiga and she describes some of the feelings and issues with the publishing dynamics that left her wanting a change.
Lahortiga \ “I think for me it was less clear. I came [to Belgium] for a short postdoc and I was fascinated by this PI, by his enthusiasm and vision. Things went so smoothly that I wanted to stay longer but I got a bit disappointed with academia in the end, especially with the publishing world. I didn’t find it a fair world. Sometimes you might have the best publication, but you are not a known group or sometimes you end up with people in your papers that didn’t do anything. I still liked science, but I was not motivated to be working on the bench for so many hours. In the meantime, we were working on these other projects in our free time and this passion grew. I then saw a way to stay in science, to be close to science, but not have to suffer the parts I found unfair.”
Switching careers is a daunting proposition. The pair of entrepreneurs describe balancing preparation with the need to ‘take a leap of faith’.
Cox \ “At some point you have to leave things behind. It’s this practice of not looking back. If you go to an island and burn your ships, then you will find a way. I think that this is not for everyone, but I also have to say, that if you have an idea, you don’t have to jump immediately. You must prepare; if you just say ‘I will do this’, and you have no idea about the market, you have no idea if you can make money, even if it’s a big passion, I think you must develop a business plan. And this sounds a little abstract and not so romantic, but it is true.”
Lahortiga \ “You do need a leap of faith and to jump, but you need to have some preparation in the background. You cannot just jump and learn tomorrow how to draw and expect the clients to pay for your training. You must prepare yourself and be ready when the moment arrives. Sometimes people underestimate the patience that you must have to keep on going, things will not happen the first day.”
Cox \ “If you see other people who maybe have no job or are in between jobs, and they want to do something, there is much more stress because there is some kind of time pressure, and they give themselves six months, nine months to succeed. But I often think it’s not long enough.”
“Sometimes you hear the success stories, where it works, but I think in most cases it doesn’t. I think you need more time and from our own experience, I can tell you that we would never have been able to build this in a few months.”
On learning illustration, their first opportunities, and finding clients
Cox \ “For me, the graphics part came out of interest. I was interested in this topic, but I have no formal training, everything I know is self-taught on the internet. I had this idea that if I ever want to do something with it, I need to know if people will pay for it. So, I decided to sign up to a stock photography site where you could upload your artwork. That was the first time I realized, yes, this works! Especially at that time, there weren’t a lot of scientific images in stock photography so there was a lot of things we could do, and people would pay for it too. That’s when we started to look for clients and started doing self-promotion.”
Lahortiga \ “We were working for the same PI and because we were in the lab we had some useful connections. One former collaborator of Luk at the hospital was also an editor and interested in our work. We also actively looked for clients. We had a period where we sent, I don’t know how many cold emails. We sent emails all over and nobody answered, but we kept going. Before I left the lab, I sent an email to all the professors in the hospital and I went to them with my iPad one by one, explaining what we were going to do and what we could offer. We didn’t have a lot of images back then, but people remembered us and over time they came back. You need to be active; people will not find you if you are not active.”
Cox \ “From the beginning we had a motto, make things so good that people will notice. That was one of our priorities so that we don’t have to try to sell something, we wanted people to come to us.”
Lahortiga \ “Also, in the beginning we made illustrations we didn’t charge for. I think that many people are not willing to make this effort, sometimes you really must give it all and see what happens. Find a PI in your institution and ask to make their slides or to prepare a figure. If this person uses it, then other people will see it. Try to find opportunities that are maybe not paid opportunities in the beginning, but just try to get your name out there.”
On the essentials of visual communication and learning from other industries
Cox \ “I think the most important thing to learn if you want to communicate visually is to not look at science, but to go to other industries. I think graphic design is a very good place to learn how designers make things and what they find important. Their approach is completely different than that of a scientist. For scientists the data are in the forefront and everything else needs to follow. That’s not a good way to approach a graphic. If you look at graphic design, for example, the color scheme will always be on the top of the list, a scientist never has a color scheme.”
“Another industry that’s interesting to explore is advertising because advertisements, if they don’t have good images, they don’t work. They communicate difficult concepts sometimes with one image, one small video, and I think as a scientist, you can learn from advertisers because we also try to communicate difficult concepts. But the way a scientist does that is to overload the image, put lots of data, graphs, and statistics, which leads to the opposite result. This is a skill that in my opinion has more to do with mindset. To be open-minded to other types of industries.”
“If you really talk about what kind of skills you need, of course, you need to be able to make a digital figure and you need to know some graphic software like Illustrator, this is industry standard. For 3D packages, there’s a lot of things you could do. But besides that, I think basic design rules are very important and you find all these things on YouTube. I paid for a few courses on Udemy and Skillshare. You can learn software quite fast on these kinds of platforms. But of course, this was never scientific illustration. For this you have to transpose those skills to science."
“For scientists the data are in the forefront and everything else needs to follow. That’s not a good way to approach a graphic.” — Luk Cox
Lahortiga \ “We also recommend websites like ‘Information is Beautiful’, they have a section on science. When COVID happened you also had all these infographics, all these ways to represent science. We tried to learn from them, to copy them to get some inspiration. You can get a lot of inspiration from the work of other people. But most people work with Illustrator, that’s it. You don’t need to know 100 different programs.”
“It’s also important to learn how to survive as a freelancer, this is a skill. Not only sitting down and drawing but also how to organize your life as a freelancer. I think this is a skill that you also cannot overlook.”
On helping scientists improve their visual communication
Cox \ “Scientists are quite good at using visual communication. I don’t think there’s a single paper published without a graph. If you see a data table, or you see it in a graph, that’s already a big improvement. But what scientists don’t always understand is, if you just show a graph to an audience, they don’t necessarily understand the meaning of the data. That is still the most important thing. It’s not just showing the data in a graphical way.”
“What we try to do with our work is help scientists deliver the key message of their discovery. And iconic representations are an underused way to do that. [Iconic representation] is a fast processing medium. For example, when you drive, there are icons to turn left or right or that say ‘do not enter’. If you would have to write this out it wouldn’t work. Also, it’s a universal language. It doesn’t matter if you speak English, Dutch, or French, everybody understands. In science we don’t use this often enough. We have the impression that scientists find it too simplistic, that it’s not aligning with the difficulty of their research. We think it is the reverse. You must communicate a message and then if people want to dig deeper they can. But if they miss you from step one, they will never try to explore.”
Lahortiga \ “Indeed now, we work a lot with graphical abstracts, and they should be simple because then the work might spread better to other fields. It’s an attention getter, the ad for your paper. And for this we often use icons that are simple to process. But scientists are often worried that people will think they are not smart enough or that the science was not complicated enough. That it looked like they didn’t work hard, but that’s not true, that’s not correlated.”
On the importance of science communication, visual communication and inspiration from a career in science illustrating.
Cox \ “Science communication is here to connect knowledge. If you have connect all the brains of everyone together, like a supercomputer, I think many of the problems we face today would be solved. And the reason why they’re not solved is because we don’t communicate enough with each other. Visual communication is just one part of it. It’s not the only one, but it is part of it.”
Lahortiga \ “You can publish a lot, but people may not pick it up only because it’s good. Visuals are the way they will find it because they can be shared on the internet, on X or whatever. There are now algorithms like Altmetric that check how relevant a publication is based on its impact and what we see is most of this goes back to if the publication was shared on Instagram or X. Usually it is not a piece of the text that is shared, it’s the visuals that spread.”
Cox \ “This career is challenging and inspiring us to see if we can help make a shift. This, of course starts with the people around you but I think, thanks to other mediums of communication, like social media, there is more visual communication. There are more platforms that live on visuals these days and for scientists these are important. And there is a change or a shift happening and we’re happy to be part of it. I don’t know exactly where that will go but this is one of the things that keeps us sharp and interested in the subject.”
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