What the He...isenberg is AXIS?

Axis is what happens when two organic chemists decide they’ve had enough of bad figures.

Founded by →Prof. Dr. Michal Juríček (University of Zurich) and →Prof. Dr. Michel Rickhaus (University of Geneva), Axis is a side project with a serious point: if the science is good, the visuals should be too.

Neither of us is a formally trained illustrator (we can’t really draw all that well). What we can do is turn complex chemical ideas into clear, efficient conceptual vector figures.

Like most scientists, we learned this the hard way. From our early days as graduate students to our current lives as group leaders, we gradually realized that the key component to great figures is sharp thinking. If the concept is clear, the figure will follow. If it isn’t… well, no amount of boxes will save it.

Over the years, figure design became part of our scientific identity. It shows up in our papers, our grant applications, in our teaching, and even in slightly unexpected places—like the annual visual design for Zurich’s chemistry sports event ChemCup (yes, that exists, and yes, we take it far too seriously).

While we were both based in Zurich, we had a reckless idea: let’s teach scientific visualization properly. Not just to students, but to PhDs, postdocs, and even professors. One classroom, one shared problem: everyone wants better figures, and almost no one was ever taught how to make them. When Michel moved to Geneva, running the lecture in its original form became logistically tricky. So instead of backing out, we did the daring thing: we scaled it up.

AXIS was born—and with it, the idea of an intensive, immersive summer school for scientific visualization, built by scientists, for scientists, and unapologetically focused on making great ideas visible. That is what we are all about: to make others see what you mean.