center-for-proteomics-and-metabolomics/labicons

LabIcons is not really a piece of software. It is a collection of professional illustrations of laboratory equipment, made by the Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics, meant to be dropped into scientific papers and presentation slides. The repository is organized into two main folders: one called equipment, which holds drawings of lab instruments such as mass spectrometers and liquid chromatography systems, and one called molecules, which holds schematic drawings of molecules like antibodies. The README is short and does not describe any code, installation steps, or programming language, since this project is a library of images rather than an application. Researchers who need to explain their experimental workflow visually can pull individual illustrations from these folders and place them directly into a figure. All of the illustrations are released under the CC-BY-4.0 license, a Creative Commons license that lets anyone use the images, including in published papers, as long as the artist is credited. The README asks users to include a specific attribution statement crediting Manon Zuurmond, naming which graphical elements were used, whenever the illustrations appear in a figure. The project positions itself as a companion to NIH's BioArt, another library of scientific illustrations, and says the two are drawn in a matching visual style so they can be mixed together in the same figure without looking inconsistent. Most BioArt content is available under CC-BY-4.0 or the even more permissive CC0, so combining the two collections tends to be straightforward from a licensing standpoint. A notable point the README makes is that these illustrations were created by human scientific illustrators rather than generated by AI, which the maintainers present as a reason researchers might prefer them for depicting experimental workflows. Because this is an image collection rather than a codebase, there are no build steps, dependencies, or setup instructions to follow. Anyone wanting to use LabIcons simply browses the equipment or molecules folders on GitHub and downloads the illustrations they need.