Visual density

Your blogger is extra busy this week, and only has time to steal this cartoon from Red Pen / Black Pen on Twitter. Click to enlarge!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Search engines for technical graphics

Image
How important are academic graphics? A new pre-print in arXiv argues, “Pretty damn important.” This news summary of the technical article says: (T)heir most remarkable discovery is that the most successful papers tend to have more figures. By plotting the number of diagrams in a paper against its impact, the team concludes that high impact ideas tend to be conveyed visually. Lee and co say there are two possible explanations for this: “That visual information improves the clarity of the paper, leading to more citations, and higher impact, or that high impact papers naturally tend to include new, complex ideas that require visual explanation.” The team has a search engine for scientific graphics called Viziometrics. My first pass, for “crayfish,” gave a mess on non-intuitive results (click to enlarge): Things improved markedly when I selected only for diagrams and photos, however. Speaking of searchable graphics databases, Atlas looks promising for some purposes. I tried searc...
Read more

Critique: Epigenome reorganization

Image
Today’s poster comes from Corey Duke . His Neuroscience poster got lots of love when he posted it on Twitter . (In flagrant violation of Neuroscience meeting rules, I expect.) Click to enlarge! Corey generously shared a lot of commentary on creating this poster. He wrote: In the work we present here, we put a great deal of thought into determining exactly what stories we wanted to highlight. When dealing with large data sets, there is a delicate balancing act in trying not to overwhelm or detract from the larger broader story lines, while still presenting the interesting findings that are more “in the weeds”. With audiences at meetings like Neuroscience being so broad in background and knowledge, our general goal with this poster was to strike that balance, to give brief captivating broad overview presentations, particularly to those less familiar with the field, while still presenting the more detailed findings that experts would perhaps find most interesting. Although it is overwhel...
Read more

Critique: frog choices

Image
The “Best of Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology” continues, with this contribution courtesy of Matthew Murphy! Click to enlarge! This is a very successful poster on multiple counts. There is not a lot of text. The visuals are simple, with a strong but limited colour palette. The reading order is clear. Matthew wrote: Almost all of the elements of the poster were created using open-source graphic design software. Some preliminary work (especially editing the reference image of the frog icon) was done in GIMP. The vector images were developed in InkScape, and the whole thing was assembled in InkScape. I used an individual layer for each section. The fonts used are Steve Matteson’s Open Sans and Open Sans Extrabold, both freely available through Google Fonts. With open source materials, I have argued that you sometimes get what you pay for . When I saw this poster, I wondered if Open Sans had the chops necessary for the job, because I was struck by the dumb quotes (also calle...
Read more