The past ten years has shown a huge increase in desktop computer power, as well as in the growth of the internet and electronic media. These innovations have provided a challenge, as well as great opportunity, for a visual subject such as chemistry to present itself in a much more powerful and appealing way than has previously been possible. Chemists working in industrial laboratories and in universities are having to become increasingly more computer literate to keep up with the pace of change. However, there is still some reluctance amongst chemists to adopt and use the new technology, and a preference for using 'tried and trusted' methods. Most of the apprehension comes from the speed with which the new technology has developed - giving the feeling that it is too difficult to learn, too time consuming, or too little like chemistry. Another factor has been the predominant use of pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files as the preferred method of downloading articles published in on-line Journals. The pdf format retains the printed Journal style and the 'printed' articles can be easily reproduced but there is a price to be paid. The wonderful diversity and enhanced features, such as colour, 3D structures, animations, interactive spectra, and so on, are lost.
Visual interpretation of chemical ideas has long been the familiar territory of computational chemists, who have used mainframe computers and specialised programs such as Gaussian, MOPAC, MOLPRO, CAChe or GAMESS to create animations and 3D structures. In the past these programs were often restricted to specialists, either because of the cost of the package or more usually, because the average chemist had neither the time nor the technical knowledge of quantum mechanics and bonding theory to use the packages correctly. In the last few years however, a number of cheap (or even free) programs and packages have become available for the desktop computer, which are user-friendly and quick to learn, and which do not require a high degree of specialist knowledge. Visually appealling chemical displays can now be created by non-theoreticians in a matter of minutes. 3D structure files, for example, are now easy to create (see later) and in the next few years it should become possible to search the entire internet for 3D molecular structures or fragments. It is already possible to search for such structures in self-contained databases and there is no reason why the searches should not eventually be extended to the entire internet - provided of course, authors have put the structures in their papers in the first place!
The aim of this article is to show how simple it is to create stunning visualisations of chemical processes using software available for most desktop computers. These visualisations provide enhanced content, i.e. they contain more information than is possible in a purely text form, and they also help to communicate complex ideas and phenomena.