The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.
Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
Nature Biotechnology Cover
11 April 2022, Issue 40, Volume 4
contents
During the design process, there's usually an early sketch phase — you try out various ideas and see which one sticks. For this design, I was lucky to skip this step entirely — I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It was just a matter of translating the vague vision in my head onto the page.
First thing I did was to assign each top-level cluster a number. I knew that eventually I wanted to be able to know what went where.
Next, I had to figure out a way to arrange the clusters on the branches of a tree in a way that would (a) fill the page, (b) have smaller clusters at tips of branches, and (c) minimize or eliminate overlap.
But I had to draw the tree first. Below are a couple of sketches. Branches are positioned to have the tree wrap around the title of the journal.
Once the clusters were placed in the tree, more adjustments needed to be made. Moving the clusters around so that everything looked “just so” took quite a bit of time.
The week of nudge.
I probably spent half a week 3 days moving the clusters around on the page.
By this point, I was pretty happy with the layout, but the branches seemed a bit sparse and much much too straight.
So, I had to get quite friendly with Illustrator's width tool, adding bends to the branches and variation to their width.
I also experimented with another color scheme that felt more summery.
You'll also notice that the boundaries of the clusters are no longer round — a littee smooth roughening grows a long way.
I created to sets of images. One had a black branch and wound up having a nighttime feeling — the clusters looking like lanterns.
And the other set having a light and airy (and almost underwater) feeling with white branches. I particularly like the light outlines around the clusters
These 8 candidates were submitted to the journal.
The editor selected the bottom left option from the light series.
A few final tweaks to the editor's selection saw a little more branch detail and contrast.
Below, I walk you through all the elements of the final cover image.
Consequences of missing data
Either I've been missing something or nothing has been going on. —Karen Elizabeth Gordon
Missing data are everywhere. Subjects may decline to participate in a survey or fail to answer sensitive questions. A cell culture might fail due to contamination. Instrument failures or mishandling of a sample may lead to missing observations. But why are missing data a problem?
This month, we begin a series of articles about practical and statistical aspects of missing data. We'll see that missing data can increase variability and introduce bias and we will ask whether anything can be done to mitigate these consequences. It turns out that, in the case where we know nothing about the missing subjects, no mitigation is possible. We must accept higher variability and, if we have a suspicion that the missing subjects aren’t completely random, possible bias as well.
Tanujit Dey, T., Lipsitz, S.R., Fitzmaurice, G., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2026) Points of significance: Consequences of missing data. Nat. Methods 23 (in print).
Double Robustness
It is not certain that everything is uncertain. —Blaise Pascal
We have already explored how we can mitigate bias caused by confounding variables in observational studies using propensity score (PS) matching (PSM) and propensity score weighting (PSW). However, any statistical model is only as good as its assumptions and, if it is specified incorrectly, it can itself produce biased estimates of the treatment effect.
This month, we explore double robustness, a powerful statistical concept that provides a valuable “safety net” against the risk of an incorrect model. It offers two opportunities, instead of just one, to obtain a valid estimate of the treatment effect — making it possible to draw credible causal inferences from observational data without having to depend on a single set of modeling assumptions.
Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2026) Points of significance: Double Robustness. Nat. Methods 23:868–869.
Nature Biotechnology cover
My cover design on the 7 April 2026 Nature Biotechnology issue shows the dendrogram that represents a cluster of uniquely expressed (or downregulated) genes in human naive stem cells induced from such cells. Within each dendrogram block, the genomic barcode sequence (sampled from Supplementary Table 1) is depicted with a Code 39 barcode. The highlighted barcode is one of those used for cell isolation.
Ishiguro S. et al. A multi-kingdom genetic barcoding system for precise clone isolation (2026) Nature Biotechnology 44:616–629.
Browse my gallery of cover designs.
Happy 2026 π Day—
Art for the 5%
Celebrate π Day (March 14th) and enjoy the art — but only if you're part of the 5%.
Go ahead, see what you can't see.
Ishihara's Tests for Colour Deficiency
Authentic and accurate images of Ishihara's test plates photographed (and lovingly color-corrected) from the 38-plate Ishihara's Tests for Colour Deficiency.
I also provide the position, size, and color of each circle on each test plate.
