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Neil Cohn wins the “ Best poster reuse " award for this month: Neil writes: Given my last poster, I can't help but design my poster for #CogSci2017 thinking how I'm just going to turn it into pillows afterwards This short (30 second) video shows the same data, plotted different ways: D3 Show Reel from Mike Bostock on Vimeo . Think about what your intuitive reaction is to these different plots. As I have said before, design is all about choices, and sometimes we underestimate how many choices we have in showing our data. You can find more about the data here . I’m not sure what the difference between a fact box and an infographic is, but I’m intrigued by this article about the effectiveness of fact boxes. Hat tip to Hilda Bastien . Speaking of infographics, there’s a whole gallery of them here . Hat tip to Brett Favaro . I have become obsessed with titles. This slide about headlines makes the point: On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body

The ESA Student Section tweeted : Conference tip: Presenting a poster? Consider giving some sort of handout: a print out of the poster, or additional info. #ESA2017 It’s a common tip , but I got thinking about it. What’s the purpose of duplicating your poster in miniature? I’ve always thought the point of having a poster handout was to remind people about your academic work. But I was cleaning off my desk recently, and found quite a few handouts of posters I’d collected from conferences. I’d hauled them back from the meeting, but I hadn’t looked at them for their scientific content or contact information since. The handout had failed in their purpose. I’m particularly wondering about the trouble of making, carrying, and tacking up poster handouts in the days where these are ubiquitous: If anyone wants to look at a poster later, why not just take a picture of it? If someone wants my email, why not take a picture of my contact info on my poster? Granted, there are a few meetings wher

This Twitter thread by Laura Williams about poster presentations began: 83% expect 10 or fewer poster visitors at large meeting. This reminded me of an unfinished project: a formula to estimate how many people you could expect at your poster. This is how far I got: My efforts were inspired by the Drake equation . The attendance at the meeting ( N r for number ) is the maximum possible number of people who can see your poster ( V for viewers). Most of the rest of the terms in the equation are fractions that reduce attendance at your poster. Looking back on this was, my favourite factor in this equation (mid right) was, “ f c = fraction (of attendees) more interested in coffee (than your poster).” And the postscript to that still makes me smile: “GEOLOGY f b = beer.” Geologists do love their beer, I’ve heard.

Today’s poster is from Christian Casey, and it won first prize in the student poster competition at the 2017 ARCE Annual Meeting . Click to enlarge! My first reaction when I opened this file was, “Oh, that is cool. ” My major concern was the reading order. Do I go across, or down? I wanted to make sure I understood Christian’s intent before shooting my mouth off, so I emailed him, and got this generous reply: That was probably the biggest problem I wrestled with while creating the poster, and I don’t think that my solution is perfect. I understand the story as a branching tree of related concepts, which doesn’t lend itself easily to projection into the one and two dimensions of papers and posters, so I struggled to come up with a way of presenting things that conveyed the way I see them. The idea is that you can read through in more than one direction, depending on what interests you and the amount of prior knowledge you bring, and still experience a coherent story. If you know what pr

Wearing black make you cool. Everybody knows that. But while black on black makes an awesome fashion statement, it is a terrible communication statement. I saw a poster earlier this year that had its title – the thing that is the only thing most people at a conference will see about your poster – in this colour scheme: dark green text on black. Rather than posting a picture of the poster itself, I used the eyedropper tool to copy the colours from a picture I took of it on the board. Keep in mind that the colours you see might vary, depending on how the image is positioned on your screen. But I doubt anyone will look at that and think that colour combination makes for easy scanning. Let’s put the same dark green text over the black, as it was on the poster, and white for comparison: You have to enlarge and squint to read that text over the black background. The white background makes the text almost infinitely easier to read. The authors of this particular poster weren’t done, though. T