Drawings. Figures for your paper, made and hosted in Germany.
Draw figures for papers and teaching from 4,295 scientific drawings in one style. Hosted in Germany or on your institute’s servers. The figures you make are yours.
Honeybee · worker
T4 · free
H. erato · postman
On a phone you can open, share and download drawings. To draw, open Drawings on a laptop or desktop.
Use every drawing in your work. Papers, posters, slides and teaching: no credit line is needed, and we assign all rights we hold in the figures you make to you. Privacy and rights
Examples
Made with Drawings.
Example figures built from library drawings, with example data. Each opens full size with what it shows and its sources.
A plot with the biology on it
A genome scan and a hybrid-zone cline from your analysis. Each peak carries a drawing of the wing pattern its gene switches, and the colour forms sit where they live on the cline.
- Peaks labelled with the pattern element they control
- Library drawings of the colour forms placed on the plot
- Wing colours and data colours are the same, so no legend
How Varroa destructor drives deformed wing virus in honeybee colonies
The mite multiplies in capped brood and carries the virus into the bees it feeds on.
Three panels follow that chain: mites on bees through one season, one mite family in a capped cell, and the virus in young workers.
Example data. Patterns adapted from Genersch et al. 2010 (a), Martin 1994 (b) and Brettell et al. 2017 (c); October means in a from Genersch et al. 2010.
Avian influenza from wild birds to poultry
The virus arrives with migrating waterbirds each autumn; poultry outbreaks follow.
One German season week by week, the infected wild birds by group, and the route from a bird found dead to the virus genome.
Example data. Patterns adapted from King et al. 2022 (a, b, c) and Caliendo et al. 2024 (b); totals, first case and cleavage site from King et al. 2022.
How Hyalomma ticks reach Germany, and where Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus circulates
Ticks arrive on migrating birds; the virus they carry circulates further south.
They come as nymphs and turn up as adults on horses. The life cycle sits next to the ticks found in Germany each year and antibodies in livestock; panels b and c show published numbers.
Real data: b from Chitimia-Dobler et al. 2019, 2024; c from Duscher et al. 2022, Baz-Flores et al. 2024, Christova et al. 2018, Schuster et al. 2016. a after Gargili et al. 2017.
One square, one story
Healthy gut against the gut after antibiotics: Clostridia, butyrate and an oxygen-burning lining on one side; lactate and expanding Salmonella on the other; and the treatment that turns it back.
- Read from left to right, with a clear start and end
- New library drawings: butyrate, lactate, the colonocyte in two states
- Square, sized and lettered for the journal
After Gillis et al., Cell Host & Microbe 2018.
The study at a glance
A birth cohort in four panels: who was sampled when, what was measured, and the first results, with the bacteria in the plots drawn and coloured like their data.
- Lettered panels at journal type sizes
- One dot per participant, legend drawings recoloured to each band
- New library drawings: Bifidobacterium and Clostridium
How the Culicoides season paces bluetongue (BTV-3) outbreaks
Outbreaks need midges, and warmth for the virus to develop inside them.
Temperature, midges and outbreaks share one time axis, next to how warmth speeds the virus up in the midge and its route from sheep to midge to the next host.
Example data in a, patterns adapted from Clausen et al. 2009 and Kameke et al. 2017; first detection from Voigt et al. 2024. b: observations and model from Carpenter et al. 2011.
Another figure, same library
Set overlaps drawn in the same editor: counts that add up, a body-site drawing per set, and the shared core opened up species by species.
- Regions computed from your sets
- Core region in the highlight colour
- Prevalence shown as dot size
Poster
Title band with numbered authors and affiliations, sections that reflow, the paper’s own plots, references and a QR code. Printed as one PDF with bleed, or as A4 tiles.
Library
4,295 drawings, browsable like in the app.
Twelve shelves from organisms to annotation, each drawing with its versions and named colour parts. Search in English or German.
Library drawings are AI-generated and reviewed by us. Origin and licence information.
A sample of each shelf. In Drawings the search covers all 4,295 drawings.
Data
Your data, drawn in the same style.
Bring a table from a spreadsheet, a CSV or an Excel file. Drawings suggests a chart that fits the data, shows every value and puts library drawings on it, so the plot matches the rest of the figure.
- Charts that fitBars, dots, box plots and scatter plots
- Every value shownMean or median, with SD, SEM or 95 % CI
- Illustrations on the plotPut library drawings next to the data: organisms under the bars, a cell beside a peak, in the colours of the plot
a Sampling
Gut contents plated, colonies counted after 24 h
b Bacterial load
Privacy and rights
A German alternative for scientific figures.
Unpublished results are drawn into figures long before a paper is out. With Drawings they stay in Germany, and the figures are simple to use for the people who make them.
- Hosted in GermanyOur servers are in Germany, run under the GDPR with a data processing agreement for the institute.
- Or on your own serversInstitutes can run Drawings in their own data centre, so figures and uploads never leave the building.
- Your figures, your rightsWe assign all rights we hold in the figures you make to you, so they are simple to use in papers, posters, slides and teaching.
- The institute’s loginPeople sign in with the account they already have. Access ends when their account ends.
For institutes
Your own Drawings, with a set of drawings made for your research.
Each founding institution gets its own Drawings and a direct say in what the editor and the library learn next. Every institution also gets its own illustration package: vector drawings of the organisms, cells, methods and equipment its groups work with, in the same style as the library. They are available only to your people in the app, ready for the figures in the next publication.
- Your subjectsWe collect what your groups draw most often and add what the library is missing.
- Drawn with AIEach drawing is made with the help of AI, in the library’s line weight and palette.
- Checked by a personA person checks every single drawing for scientific accuracy before it reaches you.
Lindenau collectionExample
As it shows in the panel: the institute’s drawings first, each with a small mark. Drawings from one institution’s package, shown as an example.
Questions
Before you decide.
The questions that come up in the first call. Have another question? Contact us.
How do our people sign in?
With ORCID or the account they already have at the institute, the same way as your other research software. We connect to the systems universities and research centres normally run; your IT team will recognise ours in the setup sheet. Nobody needs a new password.
What about figures people made before?
Nothing changes until they sign in. After the first sign-in Drawings offers to bring the figures from their browser into the institute workspace.
Who owns the drawings we make?
We assign all rights we hold in the figures your people make to the institute. Any rights we hold in the library drawings are licensed to the institute without an attribution condition.
Where is our data stored?
With our hosting, on servers in Germany, under a data processing agreement (AVV). With the self-hosted version, on the institute’s own servers; nothing is sent to us.
Can we run Drawings on our own servers?
Yes. A self-hosted version runs in your own data centre, with your sign-in and your storage, and updates come from us when your IT team chooses to take them. Nothing has to leave the institute.
How were the library drawings made?
They are AI-generated in one house style, then reviewed and grouped with their versions. Each drawing page states this, and the graphics terms explain the licence.
What is in the illustration package?
Vector drawings of the subjects your groups work on, in the library’s style. We make them with the help of AI, and a person checks every drawing before it is added. Only your institute’s people see them in the app.