Jen Christiansen

“As light travels through space, it gets stretched by the expansion of the universe. This is why many of the most distant objects shine in infrared light, which is longer in wavelength than visible light. We can’t see this ancient light with our eyes, but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to capture it, revealing some of the first galaxies ever to form.”

Writer Clara Moskowitz and I collaborated on this 4-page graphical explainer for the December 2022 issue of Scientific American. For the digital version of the article, visit: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-james-webb-space-telescopes-pictures-real/

Amanda Montañez and I collaborated on this 6-page dataviz-centric article for an epic Scientific American special issue on how COVID changed the world. Research by Sabine Devins, Mariana Surillo, and Ashley P. Taylor. Edited by Jen Schwartz. For the digital version of the article, visit: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covids-uneven-toll-captured-in-data/

Autoimmune disorders are complicated. This graphic—from a September 2021 Scientific American special report on the topic—shows prevalence, average age of onset, body parts affected, and gender ratio for 76 disorders. Research by Miriam Quick, text by Maddie Bender, text edited by Josh Fischman.

For a Scientific American article on calculating the expansion rate of the cosmos, the author, Richard Panek, wrote about two different measuring techniques. Initial calculations included large, overlapping error bars: It was presumed that the different measuring techniques would eventually arrive at the same answer. But over time, as the error bars shrank, it became clear that the data were diverging. Like many other news outlets covering the same topic, we opted to include a chart plotting the measurements over time for each method, including error bars. But in order to help our readers more fully understand why the error bars changed in size over time, I also included an explanatory diagram on precision.

For one method, the error-bar reduction was due largely to an increase in the number of discrete measurements. For the other method, it was due largely to an increase in the resolution of each discrete measurement, thanks to more-powerful telescopes. A visual explainer allowed us to acknowledge why uncertainty exists in projects of this nature, and some of the ways in which uncertainty can be reduced over time.

The full corpus—all 5,107 issues of Scientific American magazine—provide the basis for a data visualization package that explores the words used in the magazine over time, up through the 175th anniversary issue. Ultimately, that translated into an 8-page dataviz-centric print feature article, a process description sidebar, chart sidebars for the other 6 feature articles in the issue, web formatted versions of all of those print items and an interactive portal for custom word searches. The editorial vision being that the words used in the magazine over time would provide a glimpse at how science—and how we write about it—has evolved over the last 175 years.

I pitched and managed the project, art directed the components and researched and wrote the captions.

The core team also included:

Moritz Stefaner and his collaborator Christian Lässer: data prep and analysis, all graphical components and development of the interactive portal. For more on the process, see “How to Turn 175 Years of Words in Scientific American into an Image” (Stefaner’s behind-the-scenes article for the magazine), and more design details on his website.

Lorraine Daston: introductory essay author; Jen Schwartz: text editor; Amanda Montañez: web graphics art direction support; Ryan Reid: interactive art direction support; Raja Abdulhaq, Ian Kelly and Jessica Ramirez: web development support; Dan Schlenoff and Silvia DeSantis: magazine archive expertise/support; Christi Keller, Angelique Rondeau and Aaron Shattuck: copy edit and fact check of the various components.

For this first-person account of mathematical research by Richard Montgomery, I worked with text editor Clara Moskowitz, creative director Michael Mrak, and freelance artist Nigel Hawtin to develop a plan that would serve up graphical explanations as the reader enountered new concepts and principles in the running text. The goal was to help pull non-specialist readers through the story, providing lively and concise visual descriptions of complex concepts.

For an article by Antonio Regalado in the October 2010 issue of Scientific American, I collaborated with artist Cherie Sinnen to illustrate a case study from Nathan Lewis’ lab at the California Institute of Technology: artificial leaves composed of silicon nanowires.

The goal was to invite the reader in with a warm and welcoming aesthetic, keep them engaged with some basic primer information about photosynthesis that would likely feel a bit familiar, then have the reader build on that more familiar content by showing how the new technology works.

In an effort to make the parallels as explicit as possible, I started by drawing out the steps using the same composition for each scenario—natural photosynthesis at the top, and artificial at the bottom. Then I used color to help highlight similarities. But stacking things meant that the reader’s eye would have to bounce from top to bottom, searching for the corresponding steps. So I pulled things apart, and put them next to each other, leaving room for explanatory text in between.

This approach is probably not the best solution for a research paper. But for a consumer magazine with a generalist audience, we had the freedom to go a bit playful with the rendering style (making Cherie Sinnen a great match for the final drawing), and a responsibility to provide the information that a generalist reader needs (a photosynthesis primer) in order to really understand the new science being presented.

I figured that some Scientific American readers would be really comfortable jumping straight into discussions of unconventional dark matter. But for the rest, this chart—in a 2015 article on the topic by physicists Bogdan Dobrescu and Don Lincoln—would provide a solid foundation to build upon. I started by mapping out the different types of dark matter particles that have been proposed, and how each of those types relate to each other. The final Venn diagram allowed us to include some basic definitions as well, but in a form that is more engaging and useful than a glossary.

It was an honor to work on elements for the May 2019 Scientific American special report on reproductive health with such an amazing team: my graphics colleague Amanda Montañez; Jen Schwartz and Clara Moskowitz (text editors); Monica R. McClemore, Virginia Sole-Smith, and Maya Dusenbery (authors of articles that included graphics); and Valentina D’Efilippo and Federica Fragapane (dataviz designers).

This graphic leaned heavily on reporting by my Scientific American colleague Jen Schwartz, for her August 2018 article on coastal retreat in response to rising seas, and the cartographic skills of the team at Mapping Specialists, who brought my page composition to life.

For a 2011 Scientific American article on cosmic inflation by Paul J. Steinhardt, I had hoped to set up a new visual vocabulary for the concept with shape and color, then use that iconography to explain the new ideas. In the spirit of Edward Tufte, I wanted every color, shape, and line to have meaning. Nothing extraneous.

The first graphics box in the article would set up the new visual language. The following boxes would use that language to explain new ideas. In the work-in-progress concept sketches included here, cyan represents the classic theory of inflation. The yellow zone is the period of inflation. Magenta represents the new thinking.

I was so caught up in developing a spare and efficient language to explain the science, that I was taken aback when the editor-in-chief, Mariette DiChristina, asked for something richer and more engaging. I had lost sight of the context for the graphics. The illustrations were intended for an existing audience that love articles about space. And a potential audience that might benefit from a familiar and comfortable visual hook as a welcoming counterpoint to the abstract concepts in the article. By stripping out figurative details, I had lost all visual references to space. And I may have pushed an already abstract concept further out of reach of a popular audience.

The final art remained pretty faithful to the sketches from a content point-of-view. But ultimately, thanks to artist Malcolm Godwin of Moonrunner Design, the spare iconography shifted towards fully rendered and detailed dimensional shapes. I've grown quite fond of the lush style of the final illustrations. But I think that the spare starting point was key: It forced clarity of intention at the sketch stage.

The reference videos for this February 2010 Scientific American article by Crispin T. S. Little still haunt my dreams. The final image was created in Photoshop, using a Wacom stylus as a virtual oil pastel of sorts. The circular inset critter zoom-ins were illustrated by Cat Wilson.

Scientist authors Danielle S. Bassett and Max Bertolero provided some great source material for a July 2019 article on brain networks. Ultimately I worked directly with Bertolero, and developed a graphics plan that would feature his original data visualizations, styled and fine-tuned for the Scientific American audience.

Working on articles like this one, by Tim Folger for the July 2018 issue of Scientific American, are a pleasure in that they give me an excuse to dive into mind-bending topics with the help of colleagues: Text editor Clara Moskowitz and I collaborated on this quantum mechanics theory comparison.

While doing research for a March 2015 Scientific American article by Helen Branswell, I took notes organized by my leading questions for the graphic:
(1) What is Ebola virus?
(2) Why is it so deadly?
(3) What are the emerging treatment possibilities?

Those questions and corresponding notes guided the composition. The caption and left side of the graphic introduce the Ebola virus, then folks dive into the microscopic world of a human infected with Ebola, to see how the virus is thought to hijack the immune system and compromise the circulatory system, leading to organ failure. But in order to understand how the virus messes things up, the reader needs to know what the typical state is, and how the immune system generally works. And they need to be properly introduced to the other cells that they’ll encounter along the way. All the while, the illustration needs to remain focused on the crux of this particular story, Ebola, without that main story getting lost in a sea of too much context.

In this case, I aimed to keep Ebola as the focus by having the reader track the virus (painted red) across the page through time. This timeline became the spine of the spread. Human cells (in gray) were introduced as they became relevant in the timeline.

Then two key concepts—major points in the main text—were highlighted in yellow. Isolating those two points in yellow circles reinforced the hierarchy of information: context as background, critical new details as overlay.

For an article by Kristina A. Curry Rogers and Michael D. D’Emic in the May 2012 issue of Scientific American, I worked with paleo-artist Raúl Martín to develop a graphic that aimed to sum up the text’s story arc in visual form: Sauropods, once thought of as an icon of extinction, were actually quite diverse and thrived for a long time, thanks to a variety of traits and features that helped them adapt to a changing environment.

An old favorite from “El Niño, La Niña: Nature’s Vicious Cycle,” By Curt Suplee, National Geographic, March 1999. Final art by Heidi Merscher.

Data designer Jan Willem Tulp was a great match for this 4-page graphics-centric feature on solar eclipses for the August 2017 issue of Scientific American, supplemented with explanatory diagrams by me, and text by Mark Fischetti.

Click here for an interactive companion visualization, and here for a process post by Tulp.