BioCanvas

Scientific figures · 과학 도해

Every element is a real structure.

BioCanvas draws from a catalogue of scientific illustrations that were checked by a person before you ever placed one. Nothing is invented at render time, so nothing arrives with six chambers in the heart or a garbled label on the axis.

Try it now — no account needed See the library

No sign-up, no card · upload an image and try it below

(a) 1C2a · Animal cell
(b) Grouped bar · mean ± SD
(c) O N OH From SMILES · layout checked
(d) Assessed Randomised Control Treated CONSORT participant flow

Figure 1. Four things you can put on a canvas in BioCanvas — a catalogued cell, a chart built from your own table, a structure drawn from SMILES, and a trial flow. All vector, all recolourable.

288Reviewed vector illustrations
20Chart types from a pasted table
5Figure, poster & slide templates
100%Transparent, recolourable vectors
Try it now · no account needed

Upload a figure. Recolour it. Keep it.

This runs the same recolour engine as the editor, right here in your browser. Nothing you upload leaves this page, and there is nothing to sign up for. Want to see the rest of the editor first — text, charts, pages, export? Watch the two-minute tour.

Drop an image here, or choose one — a photo, a chart export, a screenshot of a figure. It stays on your device.

Recolour to match a figure
Compose

Drag it anywhere on the canvas.

Runs entirely in your browser · nothing is uploaded · no account needed. Want templates, the full library and saved projects? Start free.

Why it looks right

A catalogue, not a guess.

Image generators invent structure. That is fine for a book cover and disqualifying for a figure a reviewer will read. BioCanvas takes the other route.

Generated on demand

Plausible, unverifiable

A model produces something cell-shaped. Organelle counts drift, membranes fuse, and text renders as letter-like marks. Nothing carries a source, so nothing can be checked — and a figure you cannot check is a figure you cannot defend in review.

The BioCanvas way

Drawn once, checked, catalogued

Every illustration sits at a known place in a scientific taxonomy, carries its source, and was looked at by a person before it shipped. Place one and it stays exactly what it is — recoloured, reoriented and relabelled, never redrawn into something else.

The library

Organised the way biology is.

Not a search box over a pile of clip art. Every element has a position in a four-part taxonomy, so you find things by what they are.

97

Biological

Genetic systems, proteins, cells, tissues, organs, organisms and populations.

30

Chemical

Molecular structures, representations, conformational states and reactions.

96

Clinical

Conditions, diagnostics, interventions, devices and care pathways.

65

Experimental

Instruments, assays, methods, sample handling and readouts.

Each one is a flat, transparent vector — recolour it to your journal's palette, flip it, strip the labels, switch it to a light or dark background, and it stays crisp at any size.

What you build

The whole figure, not just the pictures.

Charts

Paste a table, get the right chart

Copy straight out of your spreadsheet — commas, semicolons or tabs, quoted fields, header row or not. BioCanvas reads the shape of your data and maps it onto the chart that fits. Colours come from a palette tested for colour-vision deficiency, so your figure survives a greyscale print and a reader who sees red and green alike.

  • bar
  • grouped
  • stacked
  • line
  • scatter
  • histogram
  • box
  • violin
  • heatmap
  • +11 more
Molecules

Type a SMILES string, get a clean structure

Caffeine, warfarin, serotonin, your own compound — BioCanvas lays out the 2D skeleton and then checks its own work, looking for overlapping atoms and crossing bonds before it hands the structure over. If it cannot lay a molecule out cleanly, it says so rather than give you something a chemist would have to correct.

  • skeletal formula
  • heteroatom labels
  • ring systems
  • layout self-check
NNO
Diagrams

Pathways that mean what they draw

Activation and inhibition are not two arrowheads you have to remember to swap. Mark an edge as inhibition and it renders as a T-bar, every time, because the renderer enforces it. Layer bands, compartments and annotation callouts come from the same set.

  • activation
  • inhibition
  • translocation
  • layer bands
  • callouts
LigandKinaseTarget inhibition
Layouts

Start from the format you have to submit

Multi-panel figures on a shared baseline grid, conference posters, slides, and trial documents including CONSORT flows and protocol diagrams. Panel letters, alignment and spacing are handled, so a reviewer reads your result instead of your layout.

  • IMRaD figure
  • poster
  • slide
  • panel grids
  • CONSORT
  • protocol
ab cd
How it does it

Four deterministic steps, no guesswork.

Every image below is a real render from the tools described — not a mock-up of one.

Step 01

Vectorise

Most scientific clip art is a photograph of a drawing — a bitmap in an SVG wrapper. You cannot recolour it, and it goes soft the moment a journal asks for 300 dpi. Each library entry is retraced into flat vector paths on a genuinely transparent background, reproducing the original's placement so it drops in as a direct replacement.

Five pairs of scientific illustrations, each showing the original bitmap beside its retraced vector version on a transparent checkerboard.

Source (left) beside its vector master (right), on transparency. Genomic DNA, mitochondrial DNA, chromosomes, chromatin, protein-coding genes.

Step 02

Vary

One entry is not one picture. Colour mode, orientation, labelled or unlabelled, and biological state are parameters applied by rule, so the activated form of an illustration is the same illustration — not a second drawing that drifted from the first.

A twelve-colour immune-system illustration shown in full colour, greyscale, monochrome duotone, rotated 90 degrees and mirrored; then the same artwork tinted for healthy, activated, inhibited and mutated states.

One base illustration. Top: colour mode and orientation transform the artwork. Bottom: the four states tint it and add a status badge, leaving the drawing itself untouched.

Step 03

Restyle

Point at a figure whose look you need to match — a journal's palette, a slide deck, a grant template — and the palette is extracted and applied. Structure is untouched. Only colours and line style change, so a restyled molecule is still the same molecule.

Three rows, each showing an example cell image, the original hemoglobin illustration, and the hemoglobin recoloured to match that example's palette.

Example image → extracted palette → the same illustration in that palette. Checkerboard marks transparency.

Step 04

Build

Charts are computed from your numbers, not drawn by hand and not invented. Paste a table, pick a shape, and it is on the canvas as vector — axes, error bars, legend and a palette that survives greyscale printing.

The chart panel: a chart type selector, axis fields, a text area holding pasted comma-separated data, an Add chart to canvas button, and a live preview of the resulting bar chart.

The chart panel — paste, preview, place.

Four finished charts: differentially expressed genes by pathway, tumour volume treatment versus control, adverse events by grade, and cell viability over time.

Output from the same renderer. Taxonomy codes are the chart types they satisfy.

Watch it work

A tour of the real editor, start to finish.

No recording tricks — this is the actual application. Watch the whole pass, then try the recolour-and-place moves yourself in the sandbox below.

  1. 1

    Start the figure

    Drop in a heading, then open the image panel — upload your own photo or generate one with AI.

  2. 2

    Search the reviewed library, match a reference

    Type what you need, place it, then point at any image and lift its palette — structure stays, only the colour changes.

  3. 3

    Chart, diagram, overlay

    Paste a table for a vector chart, build a pathway or a CONSORT flow node by node, then layer an annotation overlay on top.

  4. 4

    Background, second page, AI tools

    Set a page colour, add a page for a multi-panel figure, and preview Compose, AI Text and the YouTube-thumbnail panel.

  5. 5

    Export

    PNG, JPG or publication-ready PDF, whenever the figure is ready.

Screen recording of a full BioCanvas editor session: adding a heading, browsing the image panel, searching the illustration library, placing and recolouring an element, inserting a chart, building a diagram, adding an overlay, setting the background, previewing AI and YouTube-thumbnail panels, adding a page, and opening the export panel
The whole editor, one session, no cuts.

Try the recolour move yourself — no account needed ↓

Built for submission

Details that only matter when it counts.

Readable to everyone

Default palettes are chosen for colour-vision deficiency and hold up in greyscale — the two ways a figure usually fails after it leaves your screen.

Light slide, dark slide

Every illustration has a genuinely transparent background, so the same figure drops onto a white page or a dark conference slide without a halo.

Your work stays yours

A saved design remembers exactly which catalogued element each object came from, so a figure can be re-opened, re-coloured and re-exported months later.

Pricing

Start free. Pay when it goes in a paper.

Prices in Korean won and US dollars. Cancel any time.

Student
For coursework, lab meetings and a first poster.
₩0 $0 USD forever Create account
  • The full reviewed library
  • Charts, molecules and diagrams
  • PNG and JPEG export
  • 3 saved designs
Researcher
For figures that go into manuscripts, grants and theses.
₩29,000 $21 USD per month Start free trial
  • Everything in Student
  • Unlimited saved designs
  • PDF and high-resolution export
  • Match a journal or deck's palette
  • Figure, poster and slide templates
Institution
For labs and departments who need shared work and one invoice.
₩290,000 $209 USD per month, 10 seats Talk to us
  • Everything in Researcher
  • Shared templates across the team
  • Central billing and seat management
  • Admin console for members and shared templates
  • Priority support

Korean won is the billing currency for accounts in Korea; US dollars elsewhere. Dollar amounts are indicative and settle at the rate on your invoice date. Academic and multi-year pricing is available for departments — ask us.

Questions

Before you sign up.

Can I use the figures in a published paper?

Yes. Figures you make are yours to publish, including in journals, theses, grant applications, posters and commercial materials. You do not owe BioCanvas a credit line in your figure caption.

Is anything here generated by an image model?

No. The scientific illustrations are drawn and reviewed; the charts, structures and diagrams are computed from your input. That is the whole point — a generated picture cannot be checked, and a figure you cannot check is one you cannot defend.

What happens to my unpublished work?

Your designs are private to your account, and on the Institution plan they are visible only to the members you add. Nothing you make is used to train a model — there is no model to train, because the illustrations are drawn and reviewed rather than generated.

Can I import my own artwork?

Yes — bring in your own images and vectors and place them alongside catalogued elements. Only elements from the BioCanvas library carry the review status.

Do you bill in won?

Yes. Accounts in Korea are billed in Korean won; accounts elsewhere are billed in US dollars. You will see the exact amount in your billing currency before you confirm.

Your next figure is due sooner than you think.

Make it in an hour, from parts that are already right.

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