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Best repurposing of a conference poster for the month goes to Wendy Yoder : (For something on this Internet, this blog has not had enough cats.) Hat tip to Colin Purr ington. A collection of awesome seminar posters at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I may have featured these on the blog before... but there have been more since then, so it’s worth revisting. Yun Tao (via Holly Bik ) observed: Our current crappy seminar posters (word doc, comic sans) trivialize the gravitas/seriousness of seminars. Hat tip to Jenny Merritt and Dr. Becca. Quote of the month from Benjamin Mazer : “So you have to make a poster for the science fair? Didn’t you do that in elementary school?” – my mother, clearly not an academic. Sparklines are mini graphs inserted into text, created by Edward Tufte. Now it’s easier than ever to create them with a special typeface . It’s called ATF Spark . Hat tip to Dr. Becca . Typography jokes : Hat tip to Janet Stemwedel. If you have anxiety about attending conf

Some projects show up as posters at conferences, and then are neatly converted and are published as journal papers soon after. My newest paper (Faulkes 2017)... did not happen that way. The bulk of the paper never got presented at a conference. I featured bits and pieces of my new paper on an Ecological Society of America poster, way back in 2012. I wasn’t even there for that meeting; I had my co-author put it up. Now that I have some distance between that meeting, it’s a good time to review how it’s held up. Click to enlarge!   This was a big poster; seven and a half feet wide! The graphs in this paper shows up as Figure 4 in Faulkes (2017). But one bit, the crab at the bottom of the third column, made it into a separate paper earlier (Faulkes 2014). Looking back, that picture was a bad choice. One thing I think I still like is the repetition in the four central columns: they all have a map above and a graph below, and a little explanatory text underneath. The picture in the third

Contributor Abigail Kelly is the maker of today’s poster. She bemoans that she never gets feedback on them. Well... we aim to please here on the Better Posters blog. Click to enlarge! I hate to say it, but Abigail’s poster shows the lack of feedback. There are many problems that I have featured on the “Key posts” on the blog’s sidebar. Uneven columns, contributing to unclear reading order. (Do I go across in rows, or down?) Very narrow margins , and noticeable uneven ones, too. Boxes around everything. A barrage of bullet points . The bullets are disproportionately large, and not aligned with the first line of text, as is standard. Uneven logos bookending the title. The tables are in a data prison . Vague and generic title. My first thought was that the best approach to this poster was to blow it up, take it as a lesson learned, and start over. But my second thought was, “That’s not in the spirit of the blog.” The spirit of this blog is that you can always find ways to make an exist

Today’s poster was sent in by kindly contributor David Selby. It was created for the useR! conference in Brussels earlier this year. Click to enlarge! The main data visualization gives this poster a strong graphic element at its core. The visulizations almost look like abstract art. David did the right thing by making these as big as possible. You wouldn’t be able to interpret these otherwise. David has skillfully mixed both a serif and sans serif font in the type in a way that is not distracting. There may be a mild problem with reading order. Looking at the text, this was the pattern I expected to follow: Instead, I realized that I was supposed to go like this: In fairness, the acknowledgements can be skipped, so I don’t have to drag my eyes all the way back to the lower left. But still, I was confused when I realized that black of text was acknowledgement. “Wait, I’m not supposed to read this yet!” David was very clever to link the “Web of Science” data and “Statistics” data usin