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My last link roundup came out just before this year’s Academy Awards, which featured an ill-fated announcement of announcing the wrong winner. This article argues that the card design could have been much better and possibly avoided that memorable but embarassing moment. That’s horrible typography. I will emphasize that again: horrible. Or, to be nicer, not good. Look at it again. Of course anyone could’ve made the same honest error! The words “Best Actress” are on there  —  at the very bottom  —  in small print. You are on television with millions of people around the world watching. You are a little nervous, and you have to read a card. You will most likely read it from top to bottom without questioning whether the card is right. ... Here’s what should’ve been changed based on the three critiques I just made: The logo doesn’t need to be at the top of this card. Everyone knows it’s the Oscars. We move the Oscars logo to the bottom where it’s least important in this context. The

Today’s poster comes from Anjali Sharma. It is being presented at the Energy For Society conference in April. Click to enlarge! It’s... square. This is interesting, because I don’t see many square posters here on the blog. Something you may not see (depending on browser settings and such) is that this poster has a wide margin. Margins are very undervalued on many posters, and the margin helps give this poster some lightness. I’m having a hard time moving past the title. Those letters touching the top of the box are just killing me. There is room to center the text better vertically, since none of the bottom descenders (the lower case Gs) are threatening to touch the bottom of the red box. The lines around the columns are not heavy handed. They are light and well placed far from the text, so they add some visual interest rather than feeling like an attempt shoehorn too much content into too little space. But I always like to see what a poster looks like without boxes. Speaking of line

Today’s contribution is an award winning poster from Ryan Gilchrist. Click to enlarge! Ryan writes: My aim here was to balance on the fence between a poster and an infographic, and try to convey some complex physics in an intuitive manner. My concern is that there isn’t enough information on the poster to keep the reader interested. Additionally, I’ve been trying to find an alternative colour scheme than ‘sideways traffic light’, but haven’t had much success yet! This poster would definitely stand out at a typical conference. It makes a strong statement visually, with its big blocks of colours, curved lines, and slightly low fi images. It looks different than most posters you see at academic conferences, generally in a good way. There are a few changes that I might try, although I’m not convinced I would implement them. I’d try seeing how the central headings (“Subsurface spill dynamics”) would look if placed horizontally instead of at an angle. I appreciate that a little use o

Today’s poster comes from contributor Braeden Schaefer, and is shared with his permission. Click to enlarge! Braeden notes: The poster theme colors had to fall within ASU’s maroon, gold, black and white color palette. The western blot in the results section is only a placeholder that I found online. I’m still waiting on my western blotting results but wanted to see how it would look now. There is a lot to like about this poster. The two column layout is crisp from a distance. Up close, though, you notice that the left hand labels for the figure break through into the left column, rather than staying contained where they ought to be. The left hand side is nothing but text, but it is typeset well enough. The text is big enough to be readable, has wide margins, and clear subheading that remove some of the intimidation factor. This poster is a nice follow-up from the last entry about the design problem inherent in collaborative posters. In this case, it’s not the authors so much that are

More and more academic projects are collaborative . This means more contributors, and more authors to list on posters. I’ve been thinking about how long author lists might be best displayed on posters, and have a few attempts here. You can click to enlarge any picture! This might be the simplest multi-author scenario, where there are many authors, all from one institution. Many big collaborative projects involve people from different institutions, however. How can you show the affiliations of those authors? Many people emulate journals and use superscripts. This gets very complicated to read and difficult to read very quickly, however. Another approach might be to group the contributors by their institution. Let “relative contribution” or “alphabetical order” or “whatever other reason you have for deciding the order of authors” be damned. Everyone from a particular university goes together. This chews up more space, so you might be forced to use initials for the authors and cut back on

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog about making conference posters that don’t suck to note that this project has been running eight years now! Which is kind of awesome. Thank you for your support! Photo by Luca Sbardella on Flickr ; used under a Creative Commons license.