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I have to lead with Jeremy Fox on the Dynamic Ecology blog, which tells you a big mistake almost every poster makes : The post actually said too much text , but you get the point. (And thanks for the plug for the blog, Jeremy! Hat tip to Meghan Duffy and Pat Schloss .) Steven Heard delves into a topic we’ve discussed on the blog before: should you give a poster or a talk ? I think the poster option is underappreciated . Because talks are seen as the default, and because they’re easier to prepare, it’s easy to slip into preferring talks without thinking carefully about the advantages and disadvantages of each format. There are major advantages to posters – especially the very high quality of one-on-one interactions they can bring – and casually defaulting to “talk” blocks off opportunities. Steven has conferences on the brain this month, as he also wrote about how he tackles conferences as a introvert : I like all kinds of people – one or two at a time. No matter how much I enjoy seein

I’ve been catching up with a show called Skin Wars on Hulu (new season coming on Game Show Network in April). It’s a competition reality show along the lines of Project Runway , Top Chef , and FaceOff : make something really cool, really fast. The cool thing they’re making in this case is body painting. While watching the show, the judges often criticize a painting for not having a focal point . The artists make very intricate paintings, but when you step back, it’s all a confused mess. Nothing stands out. I often see this with posters. Because posters tend to include way too much text, everything tends to turn into a uniform gray. Graphs tend to look alike.There’s few things that demand attention. For instance, here’s a painting with no focal point: Here’s another example of a painting, by Kadinsky, but this time with a clear focal point: I’m willing to bet the thing that pops out is the dark circle in the upper left. The reason is that the dark circle stands in contrast to most o

Sometimes, people tell me, “I can’t follow the advice you have in the blog. There’s an institutional poster template , and they make me use it.” My first reaction is usually, “ Who will stop you? ” Who is the person who is going to make sure that you’ve followed your university style guide and haven’t used the wrong shade of blue in the Pantone matching system? Who is the person who is going to watch over your shoulder as you sit at your computer designing the poster, proof the poster when it comes back from the printer, and then follow you the conference? I have not heard of anyone who suffered any consequences for not using a university poster template. I can imagine an administrator harrumphing, but that’s about it. But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that there is such a person. Let’s imagine there is someone who designates themselves as the poster police for an institution. Swallow your pride and use the institutional template. Slap in the text and graphs. Try to make it c

“I don’t have a question so much as a comment...” Dave Levitan at Slate looks at the phenomenon of why people use question time at the end of presentations to not ask questions .  “My question is the following statement” is the bane of any sane conference-goer’s existence. Any conference, panel, lecture, seminar, symposium, and so on, in any possible field you can imagine, can be the setting for this crime against humanity. The tendency of audience members to stand up and speechify rather than simply  ask  is remarkably widespread — anecdotally, everyone I know says they see it all the time, and everyone says they hate it. There’s no single, simple answer why people do this, but it got me wondering: is there an equivalent behaviour in a poster session? Oral presentations are designed to be a one time spiel by one speaker to many audience members, but a poster is designed to be shown many times to a small audience that comes and goes. An oral talk rarely offers the the opportunit

This week’s contributions come from Martin Rolfs. He’s kindly permitting me to show not one, but two posters. Click to enlarge! This one was presented at the 2014 Vision Sciences Society meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida. There’s a few notable elements here. First, the authors have put picture of themselves. I’m not a huge fan of this approach , but these photos are relatively unobtrusive, good images, and they help with the overall “street wall” aesthetic. I love that the first part of the poster is titled, “What’s this about?”, which gets to the point and fits the informal graphic style of the poster. From there, things flow well to the experiment, results, and conclusion. I was a little unsure when I was supposed to read “Determining the time course” in the lower left corner, though. Here’s the second poster, presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Belgrade, 2014. This one is, in my mind, a little less successful than the first. The poster again starts strong

This blog began seven years ago today. And it’s still one of my favourite projects. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it. Picture by Lee Bryan on Flickr ; used under a Creative Commons license.