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When I wander through department hallways and professor offices, I often see posters like this, from Rottner and colleagues (2017; tweeted by journal here ). Click to enlarge! These sort of posters often feature cellular processes or biochemical pathways. They are often professionally done, attractive, and valuable teaching tools. But they are not good examples that conference poster makers should be trying to imitate. A poster like this is meant for experts, so presumes a high level of knowledge. It is intended to be something you can look at for days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. They can show lots of fiddly little details that you can discover over that long period of time. In a conference poster session, you have a few minutes for someone to absorb the work, not months. You can’t stuff in the same level of detail in conference poster that you can in a lab poster. Hat tip to Prachee Avasthi . Reference Rottner K, Faix J, B

Neuroskeptic asks whether conferences are hostile environments . I have never been the target of a harsh question at a conference but one of my colleagues was, a couple of years ago.

Last week, I talked about the difference between gaudy and bold . Stacy Shield provides two examples of going bold in poster design. Click to enlarge! Red, black, and white. Talk about a striking choice of colours. The limited colour palette gives this poster an almost “ duotone ” look: It wouldn’t look out of place at a White Stripes concert: Another poster from Stacy again showcases her strong sense of colour. Stacy’s posters are not based on the same template, but are recognizably by the same person. It shows that you can develop a distinctive personal style in creating posters. The colours are so strong and vibrant that they leap out at you. But they are selected carefully. There are not many colours; just three carefully chosen ones. They don’t look like an“all over the place” clash that can make a poster look gaudy. I would like to see that same discipline that is brought to the colour choices also brought to the content. These posters feature a lot of text and small graphics. T

Last week , I showed a sweet poster from Desi Quintans . Desi added a great question in his email that I thought deserved its own blog post: I noticed that the posters that did well in real life were made with strong, almost gaudy colours. In particular, the ones with very large blocks of strong colour were quickly noticed compared to the understated ones like mine. How can one walk the line between elegant design and the reality of grabbing a person's attention in a room that's already visually and aurally noisy? Let’s look as Desi’s poster again, just for context. Click to enlarge! Desi calls this poster “understated,” which is an apt description. As I wrote last week , I like this power a lot, but I think Desi’s description is apt. You might also call it subtle. What are the characteristics that give it that look? (Click to enlarge.) A lot has to do with the colour scheme. There are a lot of earthy tones, particularly up in the title. Even when using primary colours in