Post Tagged with: "PowerPoint"

Making Sexy Catalytic Converters in Power Point

Today, I’ll be moving away from explaining how to use Powerpoint to make sexy molecules and show how it can be used to make compelling science graphics too.

In next week’s issue of Chemical & Engineering News I highlight some recent advances in catalytic converter technology. I did not know much about catalytic converter chemistry before I began writing it so I hit the books to learn the material. One of the first articles I read was by Josef Heveling in 2012 (J. Chem. Educ., DOI: 10.1021/ed200816g). Heveling has a nice figure in the paper that really helped me understand the main metals involved in catalytic chemistry and overall products after conversion.


I really fell in love with the simplicity of the figure so I made a similar figure for my story. But in the end, my editor had some changes to the final art, and what you see next week will look different than this one below.

If you want to make something similar here are the steps I took. Start with making spheres (width=0.5″) and rectangles (width=0.73″ and height=2.76″):


Then group the contents of the two rectangles (Don’t group the two rectangles together), and do the preset10 trick I discussed before:

My setting for the sphere and rectangles are below:
Spheres:

Rectangle:

These settings will get you this:

I then made the fill and line color 30% transparent and used these settings to get a better perspective:

Just use the “2.5pt distance from ground” for the speheres and have the rest of the objects 0. Once you set the fill and line transparency to 30% you’ll end up with this, assuming you changed the colors along the way:

One final note about Art. I would never use the word artist to describe me, but I have done more than my fair share of schemes/graphics in Powerpoint and feel I can have some opinion on the process of making compelling Art. Art is about executing your vision with the tools and methods you are most skilled in. A lot of commenters off-site seemed to think my time would have been better served learning Gimp/Illustrator or Python. Maybe that is true, but I’ve already learned PowerPoint so it is a bit easier to stick with what you know. However, I do plan to look at other people’s suggestions and I’ll report back what seems to work best. One of the points for my original post was to find out what all of you are using out there.

By •June 23, 2015 •4 comments •Chemistry Art

Making Sexy Molecules in Powerpoint

Making sexy molecules is a great way to make your science shine. Sometimes you just need that extra umph for your grant or presentation. There are a lot of drawing programs out there so which one should a chemist use? I suggest PowerPoint. All chemists have it installed in their computers, and it only takes seconds to make high-quality molecules. Below is a 3D image of benzene I made.

Sexy Benzene

To make this image, first lay out the correct two dimensional geometry of benzene in powerpoint using circles (Carobon-diameter=1″; Hydrogen-diameter=0.75″) and rectangles (height=0.17″; width=1.71″) for bonds. It should look something like this:

2D Powerpoint Layout of Benzene

Group all the components together and click shape effects in the drawing pane and select preset10:

Preset10 in action for your molecule

I like this angle, and it is a starting point for a lot of my projects. Now it is time to make things round. Select all the carbons and use these settings to format the image:

Settings for Carbon

Settings for Hydrogen:

Settings for Hydrogen

Settings for the Bonds:

Settings for Bonds

Your molecule should look something like what is shown below, assuming you also changed the fill and line colors along the way:

Wrong Height for Bonds

Finally, you need to move the bonds lower and here is the setting I used:

Height settings for bonds

I hope this quick and dirty tutorial for making sexy molecules is useful for your work. For those in the sexy molecule business, what programs do you use?

By •June 17, 2015 •15 comments •Chemistry Art