flynn0013

Regular readers will know of my distaste for boxes around things on posters. But that’s doubled for boxes with round corners. There is a “square peg in a round hole” problem. Blocks of text typically “want” to be rectangular. The corners of the rectangle implied by the text fight with the round corners of the box. Most graphs want to be rectangular, too. And most photographs. PowerPoint has some sort of algorithm that rounds the corners more for bigger boxes. So if your boxes are different sizes – which they almost always are on posters – your corners are going to be rounded off by different amounts. Click to enlarge! You can fix this tweaking the corners by hand. There’s a yellow dot near one corner of the box that you can drag to make the corner more or less rounded. The problem is that to do this, you have to recognize it as a problem!

Poster season has started, so we have people tweeting the coolest ones. Here is one by Alison Wardlow: She starts with a blank page, then draws the poster while explaining her theory. Bold move. And people told me it couldn’t be done when I suggested this years ago ! Hat tip to Nancy Chen and Emily Austen . and B. Haas . • • • • • • The biggest debate in typography rears its ugly head again. One space or two after a period ? I’ll save you a click. The effects are small – at best. The study was done with a monospaced font, which you rarely see any more. It may not apply to most typefaces you will see. • • • • • • Confession: I’ve been interested in conference badges since I read this article about them in American Scientist . I keep scans of my badges from meetings I’ve been to. So I was interested in this website , which does for conference badges what this blog tries to do for posters (though it doesn’t seem to be updated). It sprung out of this post on how to make a better conferenc

I get emails! Yesterday, I got email asking, “How can I stop posters from fading over time?” I’ve touched on this in the blog briefly , but did a little more digging. I remembered from working with people who supervised our departmental plotter printers was that there were different inks available for the printer. Some were billed as more fade resistant than others. But I quickly found the situation is more complicated than that, based on this page about consumer inkjet printers. The printer manufacturer and the paper and the ink are all important variables in determining fade resistance. To start, there are various paper types. Microporous paper is more fade resistant that cast coated paper. Matte paper holds colour longer than glossy paper, according to this page .Which, again, is a trade off. Personally, I think glossy finishes looks sharper and better than matte finishes in the short term. Ink types also come in a few different varieties. This page divided inks into dye- and p

Today’s poster is courtesy of Catherine Chen. Click to enlarge! The “Background” section is good, because it explains a lot in very little space. I was confused by the “Key Points” until I read the “Background.” I would take those “Key Points” and replace the “Conclusions” with them. Eight “Future Directions” seemed like a lot. When I read them in detail, two points stood out as candidates for editing: the ones written in past tense. “A screening questionnaire has been added” is not a direction for the future. It’s done.It’s done and dusted. This combination of typeface and subject runs into a kerning problem. Look at the word “CIWA” in the title. There’s a bigger gap between the “W” and “A” than the other letters. This is something typesetters know about and watch for. “A” and “V” is another combination where this is a problem. It’s not as bad in the main text, because the point size is smaller, so the gap is less noticeable. But ideally, they should be closer together.“Tight but not

Today’s poster is from Leonardo Uieda. This was presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting last year. Click to enlarge! Leonardo explains: It’s about a software project I’m working on and not really about research results. That’s why it has no results figures (though the background of the poster was generated by the first code block on the right, so it serves as a kind of result). The message I was trying to get across is: “We’re building this thing. This is what we currently have. Come help us!” It’s always tough to have a poster that is just text. I might have tried to bring some element of the map off the background and somewhere into the foreground. The subtlety of the background enhances the legibility of the text, but at a glance, I can’t see anything that says, “maps.” Leonardo continues: I expect that my main talking points during the presentation will be around the code. Each line was put there so that it would represent an idea in our design and why we think it