flynn0013

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!

Today’s contribution comes from Melvin Noé González . It was presented at an RNA meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Click to enlarge! He writes: Through the years I experimented with various templates for poster presentation, and I’m proud to say I’m really happy with how this one turned out. As you will find, I used a piece of advice you mentioned in one of your posts regarding a short summary section — and people loved it! I was approached by several people just because they thought the layout was cool, even though I wasn’t related to their research. I’m always glad to have feedback that advice works! The title bar works well, by presenting everything cleanly. The logo is sensibly over to one side, and blends into the background. The authors names are prominent, with institution and contact information legible, but low key. This poster is well organized, which helps walk you though what is maybe a little too much material. The numbers by each heading ensure you don’t ...

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...

Margaret Moerchen wrote : Every poster needs an executive summary like this! I appreciate the sentiment here. Summaries are good. Highlighting those summaries is also good. But this doesn’t go far enough . Four bullet points is too much. Let’s turn the mic over to “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who famously pronounced : Would Austin get the same reaction from the crowd if he said, “And those are the bottom four lines”? Do we say, “Get to the points?” “Cut to the chases”? No. It’s singular in every case. Here’s what I would suggest. Drill down those four points to one . Looking at the points above, I might suggest: “New techniques to measure carbon contents in vapor bubble,” or “Carbon content in the Hawaiian plume may be higher than in the MORB mantle.” Which I’d use would depend on whether I wanted to emphasize the techniques or the preliminary results. Then, instead of sticking that one point away as a bottom line, make that one point the title of your poster. Don’t make people with 30...

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...

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...

Few things will turn away a potential poster viewer like long paragraphs of text. So one of the recommendations I (and many others) make for posters is to write less stuff. But it is not easy. There’s a saying ( wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln), that if you have a short time to cut down a tree, spend most of it sharpening the axe. Here are some ways to sharpen your editorial axe. 1. Walk away. When you’re in the middle of a project that you designed and carried out, everything seems important. But time away from something helps bring clarity. Think about a favourite album or TV series that you haven’t watched in years. You won’t remember all of it; you will remember the highlights. You can get clarity by not working on a poster for a few days, then coming back at it with fresh eyes. I think this is be the surest and best approach, the problem is that it takes time. You have to start early, and allot “cool down time” of a few days where you do not look at the poster. Given how ma...