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Today's poster is a contribution from William Elaban. This was not for a conference, but a class. Click to enlarge! Now, I have to apologize to William here, because my first reaction to this poster is not a kind one. But sometimes, my first reaction to a poster is: “Blow it up. Blow it all up. Blow it all up and start again.” This poster has deep structural issues. There is too much text. The reading order is all over the place. When the problems are that big, you want to see a fresh page. But first impressions can lie. Then I calm down and start tinkering. And by following some of the usual design principles, the poster slowly but steadily gets better. The first thing I did was get rid of lines. Underlined text and boxes were immediately banished. Headline case was replaced with sentence case. Next, I tackled the table. I gave it a more standard format, with just horizontal lines separating the top, header, and bottom. I cut the large number of decimal places down to a more reas...

This month’s contender for “Best conference poster” was spotted by Greg Fell : Clever! • • • • •  If you have a fabric poster, Crystal Lantz can show you how to turn that ol’ science communication into a lovely tote bag ! She’s got detailed instructions, but you’re on your own for the sewing machine. Hat tip to Crystal Lantz and Caitlin verder Weele. • • • • •  I missed these tweets from Suzy Styles about poster club back in August, when there was discussion about harassment in poster sessions: The First Rule of Poster Club is... 🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do 🤛🏻not 🤛🏻 talk🤛🏻about... 🤛🏻the presenter’s appearance 🤛🏻the presenter’s phone number 🤛🏻who you think ‘actually’ wrote the code 🤛🏻basically anything other than the poster and relevant scientific context 🤷🏻‍♀️ The Second Rule of Poster Club is... 🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do🤛🏻not 🤛🏻try to look down the presenter’s top 🤛🏻stand unnecessarily close 🤛🏻touch the presenter 🙅🏻 🤛🏻block the p...

Today’s poster comes from kindly contributor Emma Taylor, who was generous enough to share her honours project. Click to enlarge! Quick thoughts. Good structure that lets me know I read in rows. Visual hierarchy is generally good. Looks crowded. Would benefit from more space around everything, but particularly between text and edged of blue boxes they are in. Underlining text in discussion would probably be better as bold or italic text. Another editing run to cut more text might help. (I know, that bit is hard .)

This blog mostly uses sciences as examples, so I am always positively delighted when I get contributions from the humanities. Today’s contribution is from Cornelius van Lit . Click to enlarge! One of the things like about getting other people’s posters is they try stuff I would never do. I’d never put my title in the middle of the poster. And yet, it works here. The poster is a great example use of using size to indicate reading priority. That large text in the middle makes it very clear where you are supposed to start reading. Nothing competes with that title. The downside of having the title in the middle is that there is some potential confusion about how you are supposed to read the remaining text. But it’s okay here. After reading the middle introduction, people will jump up to the upper left corner (which starts “Scholars use digitized manuscripts...”) because that’s just where you look first when you read English. After reading that section, I think most people will read across...

You are not supposed to take pictures on the poster session floor of the Neuroscience 2018 meeting. Photography, video, filming, tape recording, and all other forms of recording are prohibited during the poster sessions , lectures, symposia, minisymposia, nanosymposia, courses, workshops, and on the exhibit floor. But people broke the rules to take pictures of this poster. Here’s a closer look at the one visible section of text: It reads: Unfortunately, due to the travel ban imposed on citizens of Iran and other countries I am unable to be here to present my poster. My supervisor and I therefore decided not to present the poster at all. Science should be about breaking down barriers not creating new ones. I hope to be able to make the next SFN conference in 2019. This situation has been brewing since August, according to co-author Chris Dayas’s Twitter timeline. Starting 20 August : My PhD student who was so excited to attend her first SFN has been denied a visa to enter US based on h...

No, I haven’t gone full Tolkien this week. Mediterranean means “Middle of the Earth,” right? This week’s poster about the Mediterranean Sea comes from kindly contributor Francisco Pastor. Click to enlarge! Francisco is a repeat customer of this blog. One of his earlier poster was reviewed here last year , but this iteration is in Spanish. One of the things I like about graphic design is that you don’t always need to be able to understand the exact language to be able to offer advice! (Though I’m not sure what I would make of a poster in Korean or Hindi.) Francisco’s aims were to “increase importance for graphical info and reduce text. I also tried to highlight conclusion sections and added a screenshot to publish our sea surface temperature website.” Compared to the previous poster, I think this version is more successful at meeting those goals. The images are bigger and the take home message is more obvious and cleaner. But some problems that were in the previous poster are still cree...

Bergstrom and West think tilting graphs will make people less likely to make mistakes about them. An article in Nature provided this example: Hat tip to Nature News and Comment . • • • • •

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!

Today’s contribution comes from Parisa Mehran, PhD student at Osaka University. This poster was presented at EUROCALL2018 , but talks a lot about what went down at EUROCALL2017 . You can read that story here , but as for the poster itself? Click to enlarge! The upper left side is blank on purpose to hold some documents that Parisa clipped to the poster. You can see this in her picture below, from her Facebook post about this: The poster’s biggest successes are the organization and the colours. The poster is clearly meant to be read in rows. Using gray bars to separate elements within rows means that the break between them is less conspicuous than the black bars between rows, so your eyes group the rows together. Yellow has the advantage of being a bright colour that is naturally light enough that you can readily read black text on top of it. The boldness of colour fits with the boldness of the thick sans serif type. I like the type choice here so much that I wish it was used througho...

Today’s contributor is A.Z. Andis , who is sharing an award-winning poster presented at Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Click to enlarge! This won the Victor Hutchinson Outstanding Poster award in the most popular category! What leaps (no frog pun intended) out at you with this poster is the discipline in the colour palette. We are using black, and we are using green, the text is white, and you will like it ! This brings so much cohesion to the poster. The first section of the poster (“Introduction”) is placed further right than the second section (“Experiment”), which violates our normal reading expectation. But at least readers get warned of this, because the sections are numbered. The varying widths of the text and images takes away a little of the cleanliness of the layout. Visually, it is unclear if the box with the white background belongs to the “Experiment” section or the “Results” section. The rotation of words is an interesting way of emphasizing key wo...

Always fascinated by what happens to posters after the conference, particularly posters in the hands of crafty people. Beth Stuart says of her poster quilt: I’m not sure this version is any worse at communicating science than the original. Hat tip to Katy Kennedy . • • • • • As part of a larger argument about public engagement, Bex writes : Imagine if our poster sessions were held in public transport stations and you had to explain your research to commuters - and have an eye-catching poster! If anyone does this experiment, let me know! • • • • • Nice thread from Tracey Weissgerber on graph design. It’s based on this article from 2015 , so I’ve probably mentioned it before in this blog. • • • • • Speaking of complex graphs, Predromics has purrfected the box-and-whisker plot: Hat tip to Ai Lyn Tan . • • • • • I’m had to ask Alisha Oshlack what a “rapid fire poster” is. But the Genome International 2018 me...

Today’s poster comes from Jennifer Pannell. Click to enlarge! Before I get into some details, Jennifer noted that this poster isn’t exactly the way she wanted it to look: I had some problems with the font, though. Scribus won’t embed them and so they look terrible unless you zoom in 100%, so it might look terrible as a png. I don’t know if the export problem might explain a few little issues, like dumb quotes instead of curly quotes. Or that there are lines after paragraphs on the left, but not the bottom right. “Fig” should probably have a period after it throughout. Jennifer’s poster has a clear two column format, with some attractive graphics to bring the casual browsers on board. There are some positioning choices I find odd, though. There is more open space on this poster than many I see, which is good, yet somehow items still seem to end up feeling crammed together. For example, here’s a close up on the upper right corner: There is open space around the images of the bird, and th...

Today’s contribution is a prize-winning poster from Alexandra Lai! This was presented at the International Aerosol Conference . Click to enlarge! The title bar is particularly well done. It’s an excellent example of a clear visual hierarchy: the title is biggest and in bold. A subtitle is big, but not bold. The authors are smaller, and the affiliations are smaller yet. And the type is fits the space, so there isn’t a lot of empty space on the right corner. The colour scheme is a little busy, but generally works. The main oranges in the title and callout boxes and blue in the background are contrast colours. The colurs in the graphs might benefit from being a little more harmonized with the two main colours. Some of the greens and pinks don’t seem to fit that well. Alexnadra has done a good job with the typography here. The font is clean, the emphasis is clear, and the table is not a mess of lines. In the Methods, I might like to see fewer words, but the words are set out in a very rea...

Posters are like muffins. The top is so much better than the bottom. In muffins, the top is better because of the wonders of caramelization , and because that’s where it’s the easiest to put on ingredients like chocolate chips, glaze, fruit peeling, cream cheese, or what have you. The bottom of muffins are just okay in comparison. It’s not surprising that there are many products that are designed to give people only the delicious muffin tops and not the less appetizing muffin stumps. In posters, the top half is better because it’s sitting at or above eye level. The title is above eye level, which is important because it moves the title above most people’s heads so it can be seen from a long way away. The space underneath the title sits right around typical eye levels, and that’s where people look the most. Put as much of the good stuff on your poster in that top half. Your big, important question, hypothesis, or prediction. Your sexist, biggest result. Your bold interpretation or co...

Besides writing this blog, I am currently the chair of the Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC) for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). Today was the abstract deadline for the next meeting in January 2019 in Tampa, Florida . Did you put in a poster abstract? If you did, I want to help! I am planning on doing a short online class to have SICB students and post-docs make posters that rock. If you are interested in taking a short online class to improve your poster for the Tampa meeting, click here to go to a form! I need to judge interest so I can plan on the best way of making the class happen. Please reply by 1 November 2019! External links Information form for SICB poster class planning

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 Ro...

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...

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...