Explaining science to everyone

Abstract digital art with curved bands of blue, purple, and black gradient colors.

Greywolf Therapeutics are one of those rare companies who are allowed to use the word “novel”. It seems everyone has a novel technique or assay or service, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts, it’s just a variation on a theme. Greywolf aren’t like that. They have a genuinely new approach to nudging the immune system in action and they needed a couple of feature articles high on the journalism-style to get the message across to everyone.

The goal here was to take what they do and explain to a wide audience in a way that showed the problem with traditional approaches and how their methods nicely slots in, all without the usual marketing hyperbole.

I spoke with some of their experts, got a real feel from them about their work and turned that into scientific features for them to use on their site.

You can read part one here and the second one here over on the Greywolf website.

Boring reagents, fun copy

Everyone likes to talk about how exciting their reagents; how they’re best-in-class, gold-standard reagents; how those reagents are going to accelerate science; how… you get the picture.

But the reality is, reagents are boring. And that’s good. Alomone Labs make antibodies, growth factors and toxins, and they’ve been doing it in house for over 30 years. They wanted a series of ads about this and were kind enough to give me full creative control.

So, I went with what we all know: reagents are indeed boring but that’s not important because when you’re at the bench, you really only need the reagents to do what’s supposed to. It doesn;t need to be exciting, it just needs to be predictable; it needs to do its job and then fade into the background and not make a scene being its honourable mention in your Methods section.

That’s what I ran with. A whole host of ads that acknowledged what we all know and instead leant on the benefit of them being made and tested in house. Because what researchers really want, is reliability.

A colorful infographic with various sections about laboratory reagents and methods, featuring titles such as "move clear liquids with confidence," "antibodies are boring," "reagents are boring," "keep reviewer #2 off your back with proper controls for your methods section," "your reagents don't need to be exciting," "reagents for your methods section," "boring reagents made in-house," "like a biological reagents supplier but we make everything in-house," and "reagents for you."

Storyboarding your blood and wee

Slides from a presentation about kidney research and testing, including images of laboratory tests, medical procedures, and research equipment.

The National Unified Renal Translational Research Enterprise (NURTuRE) is a biobank. Somewhere to store, catalogue and access biological samples. They’d asked a lot of very generous people to hand over urine samples and bits of kidney tissue for a programme. What they hadn’t done was show them what happened next.

So, while at Kidney Research UK, I made a short explainer video to close that loop.

I worked with Prawnimation to take this from a rough idea through to something that actually worked on screen. That meant building the story, explaining scientific concepts to people who haven’t spent way too long in the lab, shaping the script and putting together a storyboard that didn’t leave the animator guessing what on earth I meant.

The copy got a few rounds of edits once animation timings came in – as it always does – trimming things back so it fit the visuals without losing the point.

Simple job on paper: explain where samples go and why they matter. Slightly harder when you’re dealing with biobanks, biopsies, and the general public.

Came out nicely, though.