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This month’s nominee for “Best poster ever” comes from the Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting, and was created by Julian Resasco , with pictures by Andrew Bell : I got multiple people forwarding this to me, and saw many positive comments on Twitter, so this one is definitely a fan favourite. I am hoping Julian will submit this to the blog so we can talk about it in more detail later! Hat tip to Jacquelyn Gill , Michele Banks , and Megan Lynch . The ESA meeting also gave us a candidate for “best poster reuse”: Hat tip to Nathan Emery and the Ecological Society of America. Data is the Spotlight is a blog that does for figures what this one does for posters. Hat tip to Arjun Raj and Prachee Avasthi. Terry McGlynn makes an important point about conference scheduling , using the ESA meeting as an example : Many with “late-breaking” posters are stuck on Friday because they weren’t aware of the deadline, or didn’t have funding 6 months ago. Who is most likely to not get the heads

Today’s poster comes from Francisco Pastor. Click to enlarge! I like the central part of the poster. It’s very visual and colourful. The two columns are so clear you could probably do without the central dashed line. There are some alignment problems that could be easily fixed. For example: On both the left and right, there are twelve maps, arranged in three columns by four rows. On the right, the right edge lines up with the bar above them, but on the left, they don’t. Similarly, the rows are squished together on the right, but not on the left, even though the left needs more space, because it has a bar graph immediately below it. But I can live with that. It’s the corners that are driving me nuts. This may be a little hard to see unless you click to enlarge, because the white poster background on the white black background makes it hard to see the edges. While the central material has been given generous white space, every corner is crammed to the edges. Here’s a closer look at the

Today’s poster is from Jonathan Mohr. Click to enlarge! Jonathan says of this poster: Our study focuses on measurement, which is a pretty dry topic. I can’t say we’ve made any progress on making the material come alive. However, we’ve tried cutting down the amount of detail (which may be hard to believe after viewing the poster!) to create at least a bit more “white space” (actually not white, but you know what I mean). I sympathize with the problem. Some topics are more visual than others. Measurement tends to be less visual. This poster was based on a template provided by PosterPresentations website. Using a template has pros and cons. Here, the “pro” is that the template provides a clean layout, with everything aligned nicely. Nobody will get lost reading this poster. The “con” is that I am skeptical of some of the colour choices. The poster looks muddy and monotome. The text has a low contrast against the background, especially at the bottom. This isn’t bad in the middle, whe

Today’s poster is from Jacob Martin, which he presented at the Commonwealth Science Conference . Click to enlarge! Jacob wrote: This was to a very diverse group of scientist and policy makers, so the poster is made for a general audience. The font size is relatively small as I wanted to draw people into the poster to read it and as the poster was A1 ( Note to Americans: That’s 23.4 inches × 33.1 inches. - ZF ), it was not too difficult to read. While presenting the poster, a lot of people wanted to read the whole poster before then asking me questions about it. I assume this is because of the small amount of text on the poster meant they could commit to reading it. I played around with linking the text with aspects of the graphs using arrows and underlined brackets, as I find it takes a lot of text to fully explain a plot without these devices. I also made use of the perspective in GIMP to make the graphs stand out, but this made them a bit harder to read. I agree with Jaco

I have created a couple of new resources for this blog. First, and more important, the blog has a new, dedicated email address: BetterPosters@gmail.com . If you would like to submit a poster to the blog, or get in touch for anything else poster related, please mail me at this address. ( DoctorZen@gmail.com still works, too.) Second, the blog now has its own dedicated Twitter feed: @Better_Posters . That’s “Better underscore Posters.” The plan is that this will be an automated feed that will tweet out new blog posts. Blog readers on Twitter no longer have to wade through my other random thoughts about crayfish, scientific publishing, Doctor Who , or what have you. (Those are all still available on @DoctorZen , too.)

Today’s poster was presented at this year’s Evolution 2017 meeting by Stephanie Aguillon. Click to enlarge! Stephanie spelled out her design goals with this poster: I worked really hard on minimal text and focusing on visuals. ... I think this is one of the best posters I have designed. Stephanie achieved her goals. Her poster is graphic, it’s bright, and you can pull out the main points very quickly. She clearly put some thought into her colours, using them consistently to identify her different bird populations. I wouldn’t change much on this poster, but nobody reads this blog for “Yup, it’s good” and no suggestions. The first thing I tried is to go Samurai Jack on the boxes and get rid of the thick black lines: My next concern is that the graphs for the results are quite close together. I tried shrinking them by 95% in the version below. I also shrunk down the Cornell logo, so that it was roughly the same height as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Then, I nudged both logos so that t