flynn0013

Wearing black make you cool. Everybody knows that. But while black on black makes an awesome fashion statement, it is a terrible communication statement. I saw a poster earlier this year that had its title – the thing that is the only thing most people at a conference will see about your poster – in this colour scheme: dark green text on black. Rather than posting a picture of the poster itself, I used the eyedropper tool to copy the colours from a picture I took of it on the board. Keep in mind that the colours you see might vary, depending on how the image is positioned on your screen. But I doubt anyone will look at that and think that colour combination makes for easy scanning. Let’s put the same dark green text over the black, as it was on the poster, and white for comparison: You have to enlarge and squint to read that text over the black background. The white background makes the text almost infinitely easier to read. The authors of this particular poster weren’t done, though. T...

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...

Today’s poster comes from contributor Braeden Schaefer, and is shared with his permission. Click to enlarge! Braeden notes: The poster theme colors had to fall within ASU’s maroon, gold, black and white color palette. The western blot in the results section is only a placeholder that I found online. I’m still waiting on my western blotting results but wanted to see how it would look now. There is a lot to like about this poster. The two column layout is crisp from a distance. Up close, though, you notice that the left hand labels for the figure break through into the left column, rather than staying contained where they ought to be. The left hand side is nothing but text, but it is typeset well enough. The text is big enough to be readable, has wide margins, and clear subheading that remove some of the intimidation factor. This poster is a nice follow-up from the last entry about the design problem inherent in collaborative posters. In this case, it’s not the authors so much that are...

The Columbo rule vindicated again! Another research article has found that simple, declarative titles are the best. (The first was this .) Articles with such titles were more likely to be highly rated by Altmetric scores, although the effects are small. Hat tip to Neuroskeptic . Biogreography has a poster session guide : How to poster session: 1. Grab a snack. 2. Wander until you see someone standing alone by their poster. 3. Say “Hi.” 4. Repeat. Hat tip to Jacquelyn Gill .

Today’s poster comes from Jessica Tingle, who I met at the recent Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in New Orleans, where she presented this poster. Click to enlarge – if you need to! I say, “If you need to,” because the reason I stopped at this poster, was just how visible this poster was from a distance. I could read the title and see the main outlines not only within the poster row, but from the next row back. Even if I shrink the image: You might still be able to read the title and see some of the main shapes on the poster. That’s why I think this poster was one of the clear winners at a conference where I was frustrated by how small many of the posters were (more about which later). The secrets to this poster’s success are not complicated. Jessica used most of the available space. SICB has big poster boards (8 feet long by 4 feet high, I think), and this one covered most of it. The title is in large point size, and has no colours or logos competing for atte...