I need help illustrating "complicated" concepts (science, artificial intelligence)

Hello /r/design,

I'm looking for help with a design-specific problem that I'm facing at my current work place. We are a small development company working on AI-related tasks, especially automatic image analysis (e.g. finding the borders and segments of objects in an image).

In our public media like our website, conference posters, etc., I'm trying my best to avoid programmer art, but this has led to some disagreement when trying to reconcile aesthetics and scientific accuracy.

For example, on our website we would like to illustrate some basic concepts of what we do. This includes "generating ground truth" for machine-learning algorithms. We regularly deal with biological image data, so my boss wants me to use the real-life images of datasets, e.g. https://i0.wp.com/blog.eyewire.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/e2198-eyewire.png?resize=700%2C413&ssl=1 (not affiliated with them).

But how should one illustrate "creating ground truth" while using real-life images? What we ended up is something like this: https://unsee.cc/78b23611/ (Human workers preparing image datasets for ground truth generation)

For some reason, my boss fell in love with this kind of style, but I'm cringing every time that we use these assets. Disclaimer: I was the one who created this, using my boss'es input staying right next to me.

I have become really self-conscious about my design skills, feeling that I cannot fulfill the requirements for my job. I don't know which "style" I should follow, and I fear that using the style above will harm the company in the long run for being unprofessional.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_illustration Doesn't apply to us because we are working with digital images, and we don't need to manually draw biological organisms.
• For something like https://www.scistyle.com/ (3D renderings) we lack the skills and resources.
• https://playment.io/ (another AI company) uses this "isometric flat" design in their header, but they don't intermix it with real-life images (what my boss usually wants to do).
• https://airtable.com/ Similarly, the "weird drawings of objects and happy shapes" style also doesn't apply to us.
• My own personal preference is the style of https://egghead.io/, i.e. "illustrating technology." But here again I wouldn't find a place to apply my boss'es preference on real-life images.

I feel like tha latest design trends always focus on pretty consumer products, and I can't find anything that would fit a more scientific setting.

I need your help /r/design. If there was a list of "latest design trends in scientific magazines,"[*] what would it show? Which designers would appear in?

[*] I know this sounds like I want to blindy follow a style, but the thing is---I need guidance. I'm not a good designer and more of a developer. I need to see at least something that I could then apply in one way or another.

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted June 03, 2019 at 11:35AM by Devirichu http://bit.ly/2Kp9Rhx