Lucky seven!


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.

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Critique: frog choices

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The “Best of Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology” continues, with this contribution courtesy of Matthew Murphy! Click to enlarge! This is a very successful poster on multiple counts. There is not a lot of text. The visuals are simple, with a strong but limited colour palette. The reading order is clear. Matthew wrote: Almost all of the elements of the poster were created using open-source graphic design software. Some preliminary work (especially editing the reference image of the frog icon) was done in GIMP. The vector images were developed in InkScape, and the whole thing was assembled in InkScape. I used an individual layer for each section. The fonts used are Steve Matteson’s Open Sans and Open Sans Extrabold, both freely available through Google Fonts. With open source materials, I have argued that you sometimes get what you pay for . When I saw this poster, I wondered if Open Sans had the chops necessary for the job, because I was struck by the dumb quotes (also calle...
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