Figure Designer

Overview

A top-venue paper typically carries six to eight figures, with three carrying almost all the storytelling weight: the Motivated Example (Figure 1, on page 1 or the top of page 2), the Solution Overview (inside the Methodology section), and the Experimental Results figures (inside the Experiments section). Reviewers scan these three in under a minute to decide whether the paper is worth reading in detail; weak figures sink otherwise-strong papers.

This skill takes the user's intent (what they want to communicate) plus context (research area, method name, target venue) and returns the recommended paradigm, a layout sketch, labelling guidance, tool suggestion, and a quality-control audit against a universal rule set (vector format, font size, colour-blind-safe encoding, self-contained caption, honest axis ranges).

When to use this skill

• Before drawing any figure in a paper.
• The user asks to 'design a figure', 'draw Figure 1', 'plot experiment results', 'choose the right chart type'.
• The user has drawn a figure and wants a design audit.
• The user is unsure which figure type or paradigm to choose.
• Preparing camera-ready figures before submission.

When NOT to use this skill

• The user only wants generic plotting help (bar chart, line chart) outside a paper. Regular assistance suffices.
• The paper is not yet structured; use intro-drafter or tech-paper-template first to decide what figures the paper needs.
• The user wants a review of an already-finished paper. Use pre-submission-reviewer.

Core procedure

Step 1: Figure-type identification

Decide which of the three core types the figure is. If the user's request does not match any, either it is a supporting figure (use the experimental-results guidance as a base) or it does not belong in the paper.