Link roundup for July, 2018

Starting off this month with a “Done in one” advice article on poster design by Tullio Rossi. I disagree with a few very minor points (bullet points are not your friend), but overall very good!


Hat tip to Anna Clemens.

 • • • • •

A five tweet thread from Tolpa Studies from the recent Twitter conference, #BTCon18, about visual literacy.

 • • • • •

This guide on making graphs more readable is very good. One of the key things in this graph makeover and why it works is the designer listened to what the scientists said about it. They used the expertise to defined the graph’s “talking points”, so to speak.


Hat tip to Garr Reynolds.

 • • • • •

I recommend against tables on posters almost always. But if you must have a table, make it a nice table. This is a nice animated makeover of a table by Joey Cherderchuk from Dark Horse Analytics.


Hat tip to Catherine Crompton

 • • • • •

Picture in Portal is a course for making scientific graphics. Hat tip to B. Haas.

  • • • • •

Lauren Oldach invites us to look and contribute lab logos in this Twitter thread.

  • • • • •

Julia Jones liked this poster:


I like the simplicity, but I am not a fan of how I have to read the poster in a reverse “S” pattern.

 • • • • •

Richard McElreath shared this lo-fi poster, saying:

In a world of look-alike LaTeX conference posters, the hand-written manifesto gets my eyes every time.


Hat tip to Jarrett Byrnes.

 • • • • •

Tom Patterson describes a situation where text is preferable to graphics.

My boss recently asked me to design a symbol for Clothing Optional Beach, a challenge that I gleefully accepted. But I couldn’t come up with a clear and tasteful solution. In this case, conveying the message with text worked best. It also kept me out of trouble.

Hat tip to NeuroPolarBear.

 • • • • •

A Twitter thread about posters on screens versus posters on paper, particularly with regards to the issue of waste. Andrew Pruszynski calls screens:

Massive environmental burden for effectively no gain.

The thread is lively. Hat tip to Justin Kiggins.

 • • • • •

Another poster that appeared in my Twitter timeline, by Adam Stone. It’s an excellent pastiche of a favourite science web comic. Click to enlarge!


Hat tip to Lorna Quandt.

 • • • • •

You normally have to submit an abstract when you register for a poster. Hilda Bastian has tip for how to write a good abstract.

 • • • • •

The only good way to do 3D charts.


Hat tip to Hadley Wickham.

 • • • • •

How to make a colour palette in R. Hat tip to Flo Débarre and Meghan Duffy.

 • • • • •

I made one.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Critique: RNA capping

Image
Today’s contribution comes from Melvin Noé González . It was presented at an RNA meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Click to enlarge! He writes: Through the years I experimented with various templates for poster presentation, and I’m proud to say I’m really happy with how this one turned out. As you will find, I used a piece of advice you mentioned in one of your posts regarding a short summary section — and people loved it! I was approached by several people just because they thought the layout was cool, even though I wasn’t related to their research. I’m always glad to have feedback that advice works! The title bar works well, by presenting everything cleanly. The logo is sensibly over to one side, and blends into the background. The authors names are prominent, with institution and contact information legible, but low key. This poster is well organized, which helps walk you though what is maybe a little too much material. The numbers by each heading ensure you don’t
Read more

Critique: The eyes have it – as inspired by xkcd

Image
Adam Stone was kind enough to share this poster from the Third International Conference on Sign Language Acquisition in Istanbul, Turkey. You’ll definitely want to click to enlarge this one! This is the second comics-inspired poster in as many month (the first was here ). I was a little caught off guard when I read there was a connection between them, as Adam explained: I was inspired by this tweet by my colleague who saw a comic-inspired poster at LREC . So this poster is a direct descendant of the one featured on the blog last month! Adam continues with how he made the poster (lightly edited). I love xkcd so I went with that. I used vectormagic.com to vectorize the stick figures so I could resize them easily. It’ll be nice to have a graphics tablet to draw more fine-tuned artwork instead of hacking it out in PowerPoint. I added eyes to them because my postdoc supervisor and co-author Rain said, “These are deaf people, right? And it’s about eye tracking, so the characters should ha
Read more

Link roundup for August 2016

Image
Design is about making decisions. Here’s a good look at how different decisions about the same numbers can give you dramatically different maps: Hat tip to Justin Kiggins. One of the problems with a long-running blog like this is that I can’t remember if I’ve linked out to this series of blog posts on data visualization before or not. I am quite certain that I have not mentioned they are all collected in an affordable ebook . And there is also this list of what students find hard about making visuals . Someone on Quora asked what makes for an engaging scientific poster . Warning : contains me. There was a dreadful op ed in The Guardian about being a serious academic and how social media gets in the way of that or something. Anyone who claims to be “serious” today is setting themselves up for being lampooned for self-importance. See the # SeriousAcademic hashtag on Twitter for reactions, and Emily Willingham’s riposte . Janice Geary’s reaction, though, gave me pause: How is it t
Read more