Advanced Materials Figures (advmat-figures)

When to trigger

• You have many candidate panels and need a coherent figure set
• Your lead figure does not convey the central advance at a glance
• Characterization panels are crowded, mislabeled, or unreadable at column width
• You have no Table-of-Contents (TOC) graphic, or it is an afterthought
• A coauthor wants to "add one more panel just in case"

Figure strategy for Adv. Mater.

Advanced Materials is a visually demanding journal — striking, cover-quality figures are a house expectation, and the journal actively selects work for cover art. But visual polish must serve the science. The hierarchy:

• Lead figure (Figure 1) — usually a schematic of the material/design concept plus the single most decisive piece of evidence. A reader skimming should grasp the advance from this figure and its caption alone.
• Characterization figures — each closes one link of the structure → property → function chain (e.g. one figure for structure by XRD/TEM, one for the property, one for the device + benchmarking).
• The TOC graphic — a small, self-explaining image plus a short blurb that sells the advance to a browsing reader; treat it as a designed object, not a cropped panel.
• Everything else — optimization sweeps, extra samples, raw traces → Supporting Information.