There should be at least two poster awards


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 content of the poster. Does it have a clear hypothesis, appropriate controls, important finding, and so one.
  • Give one award purely for the visual excellence of the poster. I already have a checklist ready for judges!

The problem would be getting people to get past the idea that an award for graphic design at an academic conference is like the “Miss Congeniality” award at a beauty pageant. Yes, it’s an award, but not the one that people are there to win and that isn’t taken seriously.

Related posts 

The Better Posters checklist

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Critique: RNA capping

Image
Today’s contribution comes from Melvin Noé González . It was presented at an RNA meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Click to enlarge! He writes: Through the years I experimented with various templates for poster presentation, and I’m proud to say I’m really happy with how this one turned out. As you will find, I used a piece of advice you mentioned in one of your posts regarding a short summary section — and people loved it! I was approached by several people just because they thought the layout was cool, even though I wasn’t related to their research. I’m always glad to have feedback that advice works! The title bar works well, by presenting everything cleanly. The logo is sensibly over to one side, and blends into the background. The authors names are prominent, with institution and contact information legible, but low key. This poster is well organized, which helps walk you though what is maybe a little too much material. The numbers by each heading ensure you don’t
Read more

Critique: The eyes have it – as inspired by xkcd

Image
Adam Stone was kind enough to share this poster from the Third International Conference on Sign Language Acquisition in Istanbul, Turkey. You’ll definitely want to click to enlarge this one! This is the second comics-inspired poster in as many month (the first was here ). I was a little caught off guard when I read there was a connection between them, as Adam explained: I was inspired by this tweet by my colleague who saw a comic-inspired poster at LREC . So this poster is a direct descendant of the one featured on the blog last month! Adam continues with how he made the poster (lightly edited). I love xkcd so I went with that. I used vectormagic.com to vectorize the stick figures so I could resize them easily. It’ll be nice to have a graphics tablet to draw more fine-tuned artwork instead of hacking it out in PowerPoint. I added eyes to them because my postdoc supervisor and co-author Rain said, “These are deaf people, right? And it’s about eye tracking, so the characters should ha
Read more

Link roundup for August 2016

Image
Design is about making decisions. Here’s a good look at how different decisions about the same numbers can give you dramatically different maps: Hat tip to Justin Kiggins. One of the problems with a long-running blog like this is that I can’t remember if I’ve linked out to this series of blog posts on data visualization before or not. I am quite certain that I have not mentioned they are all collected in an affordable ebook . And there is also this list of what students find hard about making visuals . Someone on Quora asked what makes for an engaging scientific poster . Warning : contains me. There was a dreadful op ed in The Guardian about being a serious academic and how social media gets in the way of that or something. Anyone who claims to be “serious” today is setting themselves up for being lampooned for self-importance. See the # SeriousAcademic hashtag on Twitter for reactions, and Emily Willingham’s riposte . Janice Geary’s reaction, though, gave me pause: How is it t
Read more