flynn0013

One of the problems with free fonts is that they often don’t have special characters that are necessary for proper display of characters from other languages, or symbols. Google Noto is a series of fonts meant to have almost every character (and emoji!) in as many languages as possible. When I scrolled down the list and saw, “Canadian aboriginal,” I knew they were serious. I downloaded Noto Sans, and was impressed. Not only are there over 30 variations of Noto Sans, including thin, bold, condensed, extended, and combinations thereof, going into “Insert symbol” to see the individual characters is eye-opening. You think you’re a typographic sophisticate for recognizing and using an interrobang? Noto has that, and an inverted interrobang. There are combinations of letters and accents and umlauts and currency symbols I have never seen before. The range of options is, frankly, staggering. There is no font package that comes Windows standard with this many options. Buying a font package wi

Today’s poster comes from Rachel Byrne . Click to enlarge! Rachel was kind enough to respond to my request to share this, which I think is just a delightful work. It demonstrates the old adage that necessity is often the parent of invention. This wasn’t supposed to be a poster. Rachel explains (lightly edited): To be completely honest I had applied for a talk at the 32 nd Mustelid Colloquium held in Lyon, but they didn’t have space so offered me a poster. That’s when I began to panic. I am just one year into my project and did not have any real statistic analysis (which I think is often present on posters). Because my topic is very much about parasites, I also was a little worried that a bunch of behavioural ecologists and mustelid enthusiasts wouldn’t be that interested/familiar with parasitology jargon, so I might have to spend half my poster space on definitions etc. As badgers live in underground burrow systems called setts, I wanted to use this as a way of laying out my po

Today’s poster comes to us courtesy of Laura Steinmann, presented at the 2018 American Nurses Association conference . Click to enlarge! She writes: I developed a 4 foot by 8 foot poster which is crammed with great info, and that’s the problem. ... The poster is less data and more instructional, based on two publications I wrote to teach providers how to recognize asymmetry. Laura went on to say that she used a poster template provided on a commercial site. Coincidentally, the last talk I gave on posters, one of the questions from the end was about whether I knew any sites with good poster templates. This is a good example of why I try to steer people away from templates. People slap up templates that are... not necessarily very good. Let’s look at just the template background, with the content removed: The space alloted for the title and author is tiny . The space between the columns, and the margins around them, are also tiny . A poster maker would be better served if those areas we