flynn0013

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!

If I may be permitted a moment of self-indulgence, I would like to share this: This is a T-shirt design I entered into a contest for the International Association of Astacology . And it won! First place: “ Astacus fluviatilis ” by Zen Faulkes Second place: “ Euastacus ,” front and back design by Premek Hamr Third place: “Astacolic” by Alexa Ballinger I can now say the Better Posters blog is written and curated by an award-winning graphic designer.  😉 Over at the NeuroDojo blog , I wrote about the design of the shirt, other designs I made that I like even more but that didn’t win, and my newfound admiration for Rösel von Rosenhof. External links Crayfish clothing contest conqueror!

It’s nice when people spread the news of good work: Emily Jones, grad student at University of Dayton, presented a poster on her field work plan for exotic species interactions in a Texas coastal prairie. This got sent my way on the twittersphere (hat tip to Meghan Duffy ) because it is a very nice looking poster. Her stunning poster was co-designed with an undergrad graphic artist as part of a class. How cool! But several people (including Andrea Kirkwood and Hannah Brazeau ) mentioned that if the design is noteworthy enough to mention, maybe throw in the names of the students doing that design, too? The designers’ names are on the poster, up at the top under the title, which is great to see. I know from some people working with illustrators that the people making those graphics often significantly help bring clarity on the conceptual side, too. Good designers are often colleagues, and should be given that level of credit, not just down in the “Acknowledgements” fine print. Graphi...

When I wander through department hallways and professor offices, I often see posters like this, from Rottner and colleagues (2017; tweeted by journal here ). Click to enlarge! These sort of posters often feature cellular processes or biochemical pathways. They are often professionally done, attractive, and valuable teaching tools. But they are not good examples that conference poster makers should be trying to imitate. A poster like this is meant for experts, so presumes a high level of knowledge. It is intended to be something you can look at for days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. They can show lots of fiddly little details that you can discover over that long period of time. In a conference poster session, you have a few minutes for someone to absorb the work, not months. You can’t stuff in the same level of detail in conference poster that you can in a lab poster. Hat tip to Prachee Avasthi . Reference Rottner K, Faix J, B...

Last week , I showed a sweet poster from Desi Quintans . Desi added a great question in his email that I thought deserved its own blog post: I noticed that the posters that did well in real life were made with strong, almost gaudy colours. In particular, the ones with very large blocks of strong colour were quickly noticed compared to the understated ones like mine. How can one walk the line between elegant design and the reality of grabbing a person's attention in a room that's already visually and aurally noisy? Let’s look as Desi’s poster again, just for context. Click to enlarge! Desi calls this poster “understated,” which is an apt description. As I wrote last week , I like this power a lot, but I think Desi’s description is apt. You might also call it subtle. What are the characteristics that give it that look? (Click to enlarge.) A lot has to do with the colour scheme. There are a lot of earthy tones, particularly up in the title. Even when using primary colours in ...

The National Academy of Sciences of the US regularly sponsors the Sackler symposium on science communication. I’ve had gripes with them in the past. I have another this year: Increase of poster sessions, at the expense of actual speaking opportunities, has a negative effect on #scicomm training of young scientists. – John Burris (Tweeted by Kat Bradford ) “We’ve moved away from encouraging graduate students to speak as part of their training – poster sessions instead of seminars etc. Creates an oral skills gap.” (Tweeted by Lou Woodley ) Burris: Our educational system has moved away from #scicomm (ex. grad talks have been replaced by poster sessions). (Tweeted by Sarah Mojarad ) This sounds a lot like a “Back in my day...” opinion that is not provable. Are presentation skills worse than they used to be? Maybe, but maybe not. Poster sessions are the domain of academic conferences. Presentations at conferences, whether oral or poster presentations, are not the sort of broad science...

Here are two posters from the same conference, photographed at roughly the same distance. (Identifying information has been slightly pixelated.) This poster is not using its available space well. The board is half empty. But although I cannot read virtually anything at this distance except maybe the headings and title, I can see that there are bar graphs on the poster. I can see blocks of colour. This poster is about the same size the one above, and suffers from not using its available space well. But it’s suffering in so many more ways. The content of the poster has faded away in the distance like disappearing into a fog. There are no blocks of colour; everything has turned to gray. You can make out that there are columns of text, but you can’t make out anything about the figures. I am not sure either of these posters would pass the “arm’s length” test . But while both posters are far from ideal, the top one succeeds in that at least at these long distances, you can make out somethin...

More and more academic projects are collaborative . This means more contributors, and more authors to list on posters. I’ve been thinking about how long author lists might be best displayed on posters, and have a few attempts here. You can click to enlarge any picture! This might be the simplest multi-author scenario, where there are many authors, all from one institution. Many big collaborative projects involve people from different institutions, however. How can you show the affiliations of those authors? Many people emulate journals and use superscripts. This gets very complicated to read and difficult to read very quickly, however. Another approach might be to group the contributors by their institution. Let “relative contribution” or “alphabetical order” or “whatever other reason you have for deciding the order of authors” be damned. Everyone from a particular university goes together. This chews up more space, so you might be forced to use initials for the authors and cut back on...

I recently got the chance to rewatch one of my favourite movies of the last few years on Blu-ray: Pacific Rim . It has a fantastic commentary track by director Guillermo del Toro . There is a lot of interesting stuff in the commentary (for a film buff like me, at least), but I was particularly struck by how well he articulated some points I try to get across on this blog all the time. 1. Design is all about making choices. When you listen to the commentary, you soon realize that nothing on the screen – nothing – is there by accident. Everything is a the result of a careful, deliberative process (my emphasis). We designed everything in this movie and patches in the shirt and uniforms. We designed the banners, badges, all the advisory and doors. We designed the Jaegers to the minimum details. You know, we designed the Jaegers so that if you zoom in into the controls, you would see electrical discharge warnings. You would see ladders; you would see places where you would connect. Engi...

Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ. I recently learned that something I’ve called “ the Cosmo principle ” on this blog is an actual thing that proper designers talk about, except they have a different name for it. They call it “reading gravity.” The picture above is sometimes called a “Gutenberg diagram.” Apparently it was given that name by newspaper designer Edmond Arnold (interviewed here , where he refers to the “Gutenberg principle”). I’m not completely sure about this; need to do some more reading. What this image calls the “primary optical area,” I’ve usually called the “sex story,” because that’s invariably what occupies that position on every cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. The “terminal area” is usually what I’ve called the “take home message.” What I find usually ends up in the lower left corner, or “weak fallow area” as its called here, are my methods section. And that’s fine, because those are usually only of interest to the afficiandos. This diagram is wort...

I’ve been catching up with a show called Skin Wars on Hulu (new season coming on Game Show Network in April). It’s a competition reality show along the lines of Project Runway , Top Chef , and FaceOff : make something really cool, really fast. The cool thing they’re making in this case is body painting. While watching the show, the judges often criticize a painting for not having a focal point . The artists make very intricate paintings, but when you step back, it’s all a confused mess. Nothing stands out. I often see this with posters. Because posters tend to include way too much text, everything tends to turn into a uniform gray. Graphs tend to look alike.There’s few things that demand attention. For instance, here’s a painting with no focal point: Here’s another example of a painting, by Kadinsky, but this time with a clear focal point: I’m willing to bet the thing that pops out is the dark circle in the upper left. The reason is that the dark circle stands in contrast to most o...

This week’s contributions come from Martin Rolfs. He’s kindly permitting me to show not one, but two posters. Click to enlarge! This one was presented at the 2014 Vision Sciences Society meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida. There’s a few notable elements here. First, the authors have put picture of themselves. I’m not a huge fan of this approach , but these photos are relatively unobtrusive, good images, and they help with the overall “street wall” aesthetic. I love that the first part of the poster is titled, “What’s this about?”, which gets to the point and fits the informal graphic style of the poster. From there, things flow well to the experiment, results, and conclusion. I was a little unsure when I was supposed to read “Determining the time course” in the lower left corner, though. Here’s the second poster, presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Belgrade, 2014. This one is, in my mind, a little less successful than the first. The poster again starts strong...