flynn0013

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 . • • • • •

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!

Errant Science is on form again: I loved this, but I thought it didn’t include options I see surprisingly often, at least for bar graphs. Click to enlarge! Hat tip to Justin Kiggins.

Last Thursday, there was a shooting in the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland. On Friday, the Gazette put out a damn paper , and ran this as its editorial page. Today, we are speechless. This page is intentionally left blank today to commemorate victims of Thursday’s shooting in our office. I nearly cried looking at this. What gives it power is not just the words. It’s the space around the words. Imagine if that powerful statement had appeared like this: There’s no impact at all. I’m always telling people, “Don’t fill up your poster! You don’t need to cover every inch with stuff!” This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about.

Regular readers will know of my distaste for boxes around things on posters. But that’s doubled for boxes with round corners. There is a “square peg in a round hole” problem. Blocks of text typically “want” to be rectangular. The corners of the rectangle implied by the text fight with the round corners of the box. Most graphs want to be rectangular, too. And most photographs. PowerPoint has some sort of algorithm that rounds the corners more for bigger boxes. So if your boxes are different sizes – which they almost always are on posters – your corners are going to be rounded off by different amounts. Click to enlarge! You can fix this tweaking the corners by hand. There’s a yellow dot near one corner of the box that you can drag to make the corner more or less rounded. The problem is that to do this, you have to recognize it as a problem!

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...

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...

There are two good choices for placing objects on a page. You can separate them. Or you can overlap them. But it’s a bad option is to have two objects almost touching... Or just barely touching. Of course, it can be worse. Having sharp edges and round edges almost touching creates a discomfort to your eyes that you can almost feel. You’re just waiting for the balloon to pop. You get the same effects with the rectangles you see more often on posters. Having objects very close, but with neither clear separation or overlap, feels much less comfortable Than clear overlap... Or distinct separation. Unless you are going for visual tension, make a choice. Split them apart or have one cover the other. Don’t have any tenuous touches. To sum up:

Posters are a visual medium. But not everything is equally visual. A picture of a real object is very visual, and the best thing to have on a poster. A scatter plot is less visual. And text is the least of all. I was thinking about how I might make that point, um, visually, and I suddenly realized that I was just recreating one side of Scott McCloud ’s triangle from Understanding Comics . If you have not read Understanding Comics ... oh, how I envy you. You have that to look forward to. It is a wonderful book. Even if you are the sort who thinks, “Ugh, superheroes,” get over it, read this damn book, and have your consciousness expanded. It is an undisputed classic book. Here’s a except relevant to the matter at hand: And that’s the point I was trying to make, except McCloud did it better over twenty years ago. Received information is immediate; perceived information takes effort. This is why nobody likes posters with too much writing. It takes effort that, in a busy conference settin...

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...

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...