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Who else got a Christmas present delivered in poster-styled gift wrapping? Hat tip to Shit Academics Say . Sometimes we have a best poster of the month, but this is probably the first nominee for best poster tube (click to enlarge): Hat tip to Ashley Cambell for discovering the whiskey tube scientist. From a geology meeting. Naturally. Post of the month for December goes to Scott Cole , who analyzed the attendance at 2,579 posters at Neuroscience. It is disappointing to learn 17% of posters had nobody at them. But if you ever have more than two people at your poster, you’re in the top half! Hat tip to Adam Calhoun . Your title is the headline for your poster. This article looks at how headlines matter like never before , particularly online. (E)ven with the best-crafted headline in the world, for every person who clicks on it, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who see it, digest it, and simply move on. People get their news from headlines now in a way they never did in the pas

Today’s poster is up a little late because the contributor asked that it be shown after the conference ended, and totally not because of bad time management on my part. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Anjuli Figueroa just got done preseninting this poster at the annual American Geophysical Union fall meeting . Click to enlarge version 1! My first reaction was, “This poster looks like it’s yelling.” I wanted the typography to calm down a bit! There are multiple fonts, multiple sizes, multiple methods of emphasis (size, colour, bullets). I suggested trying to pare down the number of styles, and using sentences instead of bullet lists. Similarly, the headings are big enough that underlining for emphasis was not needed and just contributed to making the poster look “shouty.” Another thing made the poster feel loud is that lots of things are pushed right to the edges of space. The maps in section 4 are almost crowding out of the box they’re in. The text in section 2 feels like it’s

Inkscape is a free software that creates vector-based illustrations. As such, it’s the freeware answer to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW . Inkscape has been on my radar for some time, but I hadn’t had a chance to sit down and use it seriously until the second #SciFund poster class earlier this year. We had used Adobe Illustrator in round one of the class, but this year, we decided to let people try Inkscape in case they didn’t have access to Illustrator. At one point, I had read that Inkscape followed some of the same conventions as CoredlDRAW rather than Illustrator. I’ve used CorelDRAW for a long time, so I expected to be able to pick up Inkscape quite quickly. This was about 50% right. Drawing was reasonably straightforward. Making objects and layering was much like I had encountered in other programs. Making a grid was not intuitive, but I chalked that up to unfamiliarity and interference from previously learned software. It was working with text that drove me nuts. On posters

Today’s poster comes from Corey Duke . His Neuroscience poster got lots of love when he posted it on Twitter . (In flagrant violation of Neuroscience meeting rules, I expect.) Click to enlarge! Corey generously shared a lot of commentary on creating this poster. He wrote: In the work we present here, we put a great deal of thought into determining exactly what stories we wanted to highlight. When dealing with large data sets, there is a delicate balancing act in trying not to overwhelm or detract from the larger broader story lines, while still presenting the interesting findings that are more “in the weeds”. With audiences at meetings like Neuroscience being so broad in background and knowledge, our general goal with this poster was to strike that balance, to give brief captivating broad overview presentations, particularly to those less familiar with the field, while still presenting the more detailed findings that experts would perhaps find most interesting. Although it is overwhel

I recently got the chance to rewatch one of my favourite movies of the last few years on Blu-ray: Pacific Rim . It has a fantastic commentary track by director Guillermo del Toro . There is a lot of interesting stuff in the commentary (for a film buff like me, at least), but I was particularly struck by how well he articulated some points I try to get across on this blog all the time. 1. Design is all about making choices. When you listen to the commentary, you soon realize that nothing on the screen – nothing – is there by accident. Everything is a the result of a careful, deliberative process (my emphasis). We designed everything in this movie and patches in the shirt and uniforms. We designed the banners, badges, all the advisory and doors. We designed the Jaegers to the minimum details. You know, we designed the Jaegers so that if you zoom in into the controls, you would see electrical discharge warnings. You would see ladders; you would see places where you would connect. Engi