flynn0013

Mike Pacchione at Duarte Design talks about how my wife created a powerful professional poster . Mike writes: Let’s summarize so you can apply this to your work, whether it’s a poster, slides or something else: Figure out the story you’re trying to tell. You need to be able to do that in a short sentence, two at most. ( The ABT template is helpful here. - ZF ) Write down everything you know about the topic, then remove anything that does not directly help tell the story you’re trying to tell. ( Writing down everything could take a while. Maybe just continually ask, “Do I need this?” - ZF ) Group your content together. Use visuals to express those groups. Make sure there’s enough white space. And here’s the makeover! Click to enlarge. Duarte Design doesn’t date their blog posts, so I’m not sure how late I am to the game on this one. • • • • • A big guide to tools to help you use colour effectively in data visualization. An update of an older post. Hat tip to Lisa Roust and Janet Stem

Today in, “Things I should not have to say.” A poster session is a place for exchange of scientific and technical information between professional adults. It is not a place for you to hit on people for a hook up or booty call. Beth Ann McLaughlin asked : Women of STEM, Quick question At any given science poster presentation, what percent of the time do you have a man at your poster who just won't go away and makes you uncomfortable? Results? 16% of women said every conference, 14% said 50-99% of them, 19% said 25-49% of them, and 51% of respondents said less than 25% of them. Now, sure I could niggle about the poll is structured might inflate perceptions of how common this is (there’s an option for 100%, but not 0%, so the most common situation could be women not getting bothered), but even if every one of that 51% was really never, that still means that half of women poster presenters had a bad experience. And that’s unacceptable. And reading the replies to that poll is not fun.

If you must  have a table on your poster, look into what options you have for your numbers. Many fonts have number variants. Proportional numbers have skinny numbers (e.g., 1) and wide numbers (e.g., 0). Two numbers differ in width depending on what numbers they have. But tabular numbers are all the same width. So decimal places and dividers will line up if the numbers are lined up, as they are in a table. If you have a table, it only makes sense to use tabular numbers if you can. They are explicitly designed to make your tables more readable! But tabular numbers will only do so if you follow a couple of other good practices: Make your numbers right aligned. Use the same number of decimal places in each column. You may also find a couple of other options. numbers can be either lining numbers (all the same height) or oldstyle (with ascenders and descenders, like upper and lower-case letters). That means you have four options for many fonts. In Microsoft Office, these options are som

Today’s poster comes courtesy of contributor Carolyn Bauer. Her work has been featured before , and I’m pleased she liked the experience enough to come back for seconds! Click to enlarge this poster that was recently presented at the International Congress of Neuroendocrinology ! I like this. The illustration on the right is an approachable entry point. I also like the columns, one for each hypothesis. What I wasn’t as crazy about was the title area. Two lines for the title and three for the authors was chewing up a lot of space than it needed. I changed the all capital names to regular letters, and dropped a lot of department affiliations and cities that I honestly think nobody cares about. Some of my other revisions were my most common ones: to open up the margins, both around the border and between elements. In the revision below, there’s at least an inch around the edge. I continued along with a few other changes. One of the things that bugged me was the birds are all facing to the

Andrzej Zielezinski‏ was proud of this poster , made entirely in the freeware package Inkscape. Impressive to me, because I struggled with Inkscape . Click to enlarge! One of the most interesting aspects of the poster is the diagrams on the diagonal. As Ellen Lupton notes in the book How Posters Work , many great posters use diagonals to bring action and life into a design. Here’s how Andrzej did it: I drew all 5 main elements (home page, 2 diagrams, ROC curves and navigation) in 2D. The image showing a guy on the mountain was also pasted in 2D. Then I skewed each element -63* horizontally and -27* vertically (Inkscape menu - Object - Transform - Skew). Shadows are just skewed and black rectangulars with some transparency (RGBA: 42424248) and blur set to 2.7. An issue with that diagonal, though, is that because the figure reaches up into the upper right corner, the title can’t reach over into that space. So the title seems a little small to me. And when the title is 90% of your commun