'“I’m not an artist; I can’t draw anything else,” she said in a recent interview with Quanta. It was “a lot of draw and erase, draw and erase, draw and erase.” After a year of trial and error, she homed in on elegant sheets and looping ribbons to represent atomic structures. These drawings, which first appeared in the journal Advances in Protein Chemistry in 1981, became known as ribbon diagrams.'

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-colorful-ribbon-diagrams-became-the-face-of-proteins-20240823/?mc_cid=55c0658007&mc_eid=5bf3529200