Was contacted by a mentor (and also my PhD advisor) that a team of primary authors needed my help. They had finished a paper that she was a co-author on (as the shellfish biology/physiology specialist) and a journal had accepted it but they had to have a graphical abstract to pass final approval to publish. This is becoming more and more common with a lot of journals. Seems a (decent actually) concession to the shortening attention spans, increasing information flow reality.

To start they wanted me to send them some tips how to go about it. No problem, I know half the authors, several are at my former institution too, so sent them my general approach ( treat it as a Mini-poster - Key Question, followed by summary of key take-away data in visually appealing/engaging way, finally Concise but accurate conclusion) and some tips.

In the end I was commissioned to do it for/with them.

The paper examines differences in how different types (species) of Mercury (Hg) are stored in different areas of Quahog clam anatomy. They looked at Total Mercury (THg), Methylmercury (MeHg) and Inorganic Mercury (iHg). Each of those types of mercury have different human health effects and effects on other wildlife that ingests it. So yay biology, physiology and chemistry.. all together (usually are).
(Their paper is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749125006608 )

What I started with was one of the coauthors attempt to make a graphical abstract and the finished last draft of the paper. After reading all of the paper BUT the abstract, I emailed the authors with a summary of MY key take aways from the paper, along with a quick question on the statistical results (difference on how biologists and chemists report concentrations). I included a rough thumbnail of my idea for the graphic abstract based on my reading. The lead author said I nailed the key take aways and approved the thumbnail approach (which did change a bit, but...)

Fortunately, they loved the final graphic abstract and hopefully either use it as a guide for their future papers or use the services of myself or another scientific illustrator.