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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...

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 . • • • • •

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...

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...

Paul Frankland compares the electronic poster session to the traditional paper poster session at the 11 th Federation Of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum of Neuroscience . Here are electronic posters: And here are the paper posters: I think this may be a “attendance vortex.” If the number of e-posters is small, there will be few people browsing no matter how good the posters are. People will go where there are people, which reinforces the poor attendance. Electronic posters were courtesy Morressier , according to Gemma . • • • • • You are going to have to click through to see the video of this poster from the lab of Prosanta Chakrabarty. It... spins. Like Wheel of Fortune spins. This serves no communicative purpose. But it is fun. Hat tip to Tidepool Ann. • • • • • The littlest poster presenter, at the International Congress for Neuroethology . Courtesy of Dr. Paloma . • • • • • Dr. Petra has a Twitter thread a...

Starting off this month with a “Done in one” advice article on poster design by Tullio Rossi. I disagree with a few very minor points (bullet points are not your friend ), but overall very good! Hat tip to Anna Clemens .  • • • • • A five tweet thread from Tolpa Studies from the recent Twitter conference, #BTCon18, about visual literacy.  • • • • • This guide on making graphs more readable is very good. One of the key things in this graph makeover and why it works is the designer listened to what the scientists said about it . They used the expertise to defined the graph’s “talking points”, so to speak. Hat tip to Garr Reynolds.  • • • • • I recommend against tables on posters almost always. But if you must have a table, make it a nice table. This is a nice animated makeover of a table by Joey Cherderchuk from Dark Horse Analytics. Hat tip to Catherine Crompton  • • • • • Picture i...

Poster season has started, so we have people tweeting the coolest ones. Here is one by Alison Wardlow: She starts with a blank page, then draws the poster while explaining her theory. Bold move. And people told me it couldn’t be done when I suggested this years ago ! Hat tip to Nancy Chen and Emily Austen . and B. Haas . • • • • • • The biggest debate in typography rears its ugly head again. One space or two after a period ? I’ll save you a click. The effects are small – at best. The study was done with a monospaced font, which you rarely see any more. It may not apply to most typefaces you will see. • • • • • • Confession: I’ve been interested in conference badges since I read this article about them in American Scientist . I keep scans of my badges from meetings I’ve been to. So I was interested in this website , which does for conference badges what this blog tries to do for posters (though it doesn’t seem to be updated). It sprung o...

Charlotte Payne , I love you! Well, not in that way. I love you for tweeting about posters in haiku. I think my favourite is this one , on de-extinction: resurrect the lost? can we really right our wrongs with a tweaked dodo? • • • Here’s how Meredith Rawls made an award-winning poster . Here are a couple of points in her description that I like: Re-read the abstract you submitted to the conference weeks ago. Is it overly ambitious? Totally off-base? No matter. Your poster is an opportunity to communicate what you’ve done as of TODAY. Do you know what I did with all the words I wanted to put on my poster but didn’t? I used them in conversations, and they appear or will appear in papers. And here’s said poster: Very nice! • • • A lot of people on Twitter were impressed by this poster : This is a great example of how a poster can be, at one time, very simple and focused conceptually (there’s really only one figure, and no text elaborating introductions and methods and so on), and yet s...

Animate Science has a “done in one” blog post about how to design a poster . Readers of the blog will find a lot of advise there familiar, but it’s very well done. It’s a much better “single serve” post than this blog is. (It’s not fair to expect newbies to read through nine years of posts.) I might do a few things in their sample a little differently, though. Why put that big, eye-popping octopus picture down in the corner? And those dark colours might not be very readable if the lighting is poor. • • • I’ve discussed accessibility issues with poster presentations before. But Sara Schley, writing for Inside Higher Education , argues that posters can, in some cases, be superior formats for students with accessibility issues: Consider a poster session . Many faculty members assign individual or team presentations as a culminating activity at the end of the term. The learning goals of such activities often include student synthesis of information, oral presentation and writing. But the e...

Neuroskeptic asks whether conferences are hostile environments . I have never been the target of a harsh question at a conference but one of my colleagues was, a couple of years ago.

One of the problems with free fonts is that they often don’t have special characters that are necessary for proper display of characters from other languages, or symbols. Google Noto is a series of fonts meant to have almost every character (and emoji!) in as many languages as possible. When I scrolled down the list and saw, “Canadian aboriginal,” I knew they were serious. I downloaded Noto Sans, and was impressed. Not only are there over 30 variations of Noto Sans, including thin, bold, condensed, extended, and combinations thereof, going into “Insert symbol” to see the individual characters is eye-opening. You think you’re a typographic sophisticate for recognizing and using an interrobang? Noto has that, and an inverted interrobang. There are combinations of letters and accents and umlauts and currency symbols I have never seen before. The range of options is, frankly, staggering. There is no font package that comes Windows standard with this many options. Buying a font package wi...

The link roundup after the massive Neuroscience meeting is always fun. Just ask Shaena Montanari , “How big is that meeting?” Was at the bar tonight in DC and saw poster tubes... I’m not even a neuroscientist and I knew. #SfN17 With tens of thousands of posters, I find classics like this, from Steve Ramirez : Always check your dimensions before printing. I have written before about how people incorporated video into their poster demonstrations (QR codes, iPdas, etc.). But this is the first time I have seen anyone do a virtual reality (VR) demo at a poster: Advice from Caitlin Vanderweele: Convince your labmate to carry the poster tube. Justin Kiggins noted : Incredible how many posters at #SfN17 have "Preprint available at @biorxivpreprint" & a DOI/QR #asapbio Coffee & Science asked : Poster session didn’t go well? • • • • • Everything old is new again. Fabric posters have been done since the 17th century: The thesis of François Marescot, printed on silk, is on disp...

This month’s link round-up begins with a big tutorial on making posters by Desi Quintans, “ How I make conference posters .” Excerpt: About my design ethos I think that visual design is just as important as content. I believe that by adapting lessons from other fields of publishing, we can design posters that are unconventional and surprising, and yet attractive to look at and informative to read. The alternative is to be cursed with posters that all look the same . This lengthy piece covers some material that’s familiar to regular readers, but provides it in a convenient one-stop shop. It’s this month’s “must read!” ••••• Nichloas Rowe has authored Academic & Scientific Poster Presentation: A Modern Comprehensive Guide for Springer. I may have a longer review later, but wanted to bring this to people’s attention now. ••••• Earyn McGee also has a thread on Twitter that describes her lessons as an early poster presenter, presenting at the SACNAS 2017 conference. Hat tip to Tob...