flynn0013

This month’s link round-up begins with a big tutorial on making posters by Desi Quintans, “ How I make conference posters .” Excerpt: About my design ethos I think that visual design is just as important as content. I believe that by adapting lessons from other fields of publishing, we can design posters that are unconventional and surprising, and yet attractive to look at and informative to read. The alternative is to be cursed with posters that all look the same . This lengthy piece covers some material that’s familiar to regular readers, but provides it in a convenient one-stop shop. It’s this month’s “must read!” ••••• Nichloas Rowe has authored Academic & Scientific Poster Presentation: A Modern Comprehensive Guide for Springer. I may have a longer review later, but wanted to bring this to people’s attention now. ••••• Earyn McGee also has a thread on Twitter that describes her lessons as an early poster presenter, presenting at the SACNAS 2017 conference. Hat tip to Tob

Today’s poster is a contribution from Antje Girndt, who presented this at the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) 2017 meeting in Groningen, the Netherlands. Click to enlarge! Antje was kind enough to write her own analysis of this poster: It uses a Dutch colour theme and comes with little text. The introduction is pushed to the bottom and I am almost not explaining the methods. QR codes link to my profile and the accompanying data and script at the Open Science Framework. ... I like my final product but at the same time, I am not fully satisfied. The lower bit with the bullets, affiliations and references somehow bugs me, but I cannot pinpoint why. Antje’s approach is very much in line with the style I have been moving towards lately: make a simple, big statement up top. I think it could have been an even stronger title if the title said “why it matters.” Maybe something like “Sampling methods affect bird sperm data” or “Bird sperm should only be collected with one method

Most of the time, I think my poster aesthetic might be described as Swiss style. That’s the period that saw the creation of Helvetica, for instance. It’s a style that is very spare and very organized , with lots of emphasis on grids. You can see it in this poster I made for the American Society for Parasitologists meeting in 2014. Click to enlarge! This was a noble, but in my mind, failed experiment. I wanted someone to get the main point of the poster by reading across the top row. I wanted people to get the supporting details in each column. It kind of works, kind of doesn’t. The top row works best because it is all photos. The graphics in the rows below that are not consistent enough to make the idea work. The text block in the bottom right doesn’t follow through with the lines established in the two rows above, and the three images to the left of it. I still like using huge numbers to bring home the main difference in infection rates between the two species instead of a graph. Si