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Diana Hernandez has this month’s “best re-use of a poster” nominee: How to deal with awkward questions at a conference , by Dani Rabaiotti. Hat tip to Stephen Heard. Netflix recently premiered an original documentary about design called Abstract: The Art of Design . I’ve been waiting to mention it until I finished it. Each of the eight episodes showcases one designer in a different field. Each is a combination of biography and case study. It’s good, but not great . For poster makers, probably the most relevant is Episode 6, featuring Paula Scher, which is mostly about typography. I also like Episodes 2 and 5, on shoe and car design. respectively, because those are the furthest from my experience and the most novel to me. Speaking of typography, Bear Knee Sanders probably had no idea what he was wading into with this tweet : Heaven . God : You may ask me one question. Me : Why aren’t there lowercase and uppercase numbers? God : What? Me : I wanna write loud numbers. Watch the type nerd

Today’s contribution comes from Annie Snow, who was kind enough to share this poster with blog readers. You will probably need to click to enlarge this one! The rainbow background pops . A rainbow is the symbol of pride for a wide community that includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, intersex, and others (I apologize to anyone who love the rainbow that I neglected to mention). And since lesbian, gay, and bi people are the subject of study here, the rainbow is a clear visual signal for the topic. The rainbow is clearly visible as a rainbow and not just as random colours, because Annie made the margins between the columns wide. I also love that the rainbow is even continued into the colour fills for the bar graphs in the second column. But I am experiencing some cognitive dissonance when I dig into the content of the poster. The bright rainbow colours of pride say exuberant and joyous, which is not how people normally describe the poster’s topic: suicide and depression. T

Microsoft Publisher is my go to software package for making posters. It hits a sweet point for me between power and ease of use. I recently found another reason to use Publisher: it lets you in to a whole new realm of type you might not have known existed. Many professional fonts in the OpenType format include not only standard letters, but alternate letter shapes, or “glyphs.” For instance, you can have you choice of shapes for lowercase “g”: Or fantastic artistic swashes: I recently bought a new font for a poster, Plusquam Sans , in part because I wanted to play with the alternate glyphs. I almost had a heart attack because I couldn’t find the alternate glyphs at first. But I got lucky, and stumbled up how to use them. Of the entire Microsoft Office package, it seems that only Publisher lets you play with alternate glyphs and swashes without too much effort. Here’s how. Select your text, then go up to the ribbon an pop up the fonts menu. Once you have the font menu, look for the “Typ

Many conferences have some sort of awards for “Best student poster.” But John Vanek recently noted something I pointed out early on in this blog: the winners are often not very good looking posters. Pet peeve: when posters that are simply walls of text win best poster awards, despite all the advice that stresses not to do that. This is not surprising. I’ve judged many presentations, and there is always some sort of scoring sheet to guide the judges. Those scoring schemes always weight the content of the presentation (whether poster or talk) more heavily than the visual excellence of the presentation. Hey, conference organizers: be like the Oscars. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognize that there are many components to making movies. These all deserve to be recognized. So they have the main Oscars, and a separate ceremony for scientific and technical awards. If you are going to judge poster presentations, make two awards. Give one award purely for the scientific co