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R users may be interested in this poster... not sure what to call it. Template? Package? It’s here , in any case. I am not an R user, so I am not in a position to evaluate it. Hat tip to Karthik Ram and Milton Tan . Rolf Hut proclaims this the best poster from EGU 2017 meeting. Nevertheless, controversy erupted . Hat tip to Nasty Lab Manager . Dani Rabaiotti has a long post on conference etiquette . It is mostly concerned with asking questions and avoiding the “all out war” scenario. Hat tip to Stephen Heard. Catherine Cavallo forwarded this advice from Graham Phillips of the Australian television show Catalyst. While I think it is geared to journalists, it applies to posters, too. Hat tip to Melissa Márquez . A free little ebook on using Inkscape for biological illustration . Hat tip to Chris Borkent and Morgan Jackson. Melissa Márquez has a post on conference networking . At its core, networking isn’t about how other people can help you… it is how you can help other people ....

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...

Not one but two posters are up today! This is fun, because I don’t often get to show people trying different things. Today’s posters are both from Chris Miles , a graduate student in mathematics. Chris writes: I’m in a weird misfit field: mathematical biology, which seems to take certain aspects of each culture, like posters from biology. However, this leads to some culture clashes, like having a math-heavy poster. I guess my question is: how math-heavy is too math-heavy if math is the focus of the poster? This is an excellent question, and reminiscent of a similar question I got about posters in the humanities . Let’s see. Here’s Chris’s current poster (which you can click to enlarge): I like this. Clean, straightforward. Colouring a lot of the text bring some visual interest. There are a couple of elements that distract me. The right side of the title bar. The logo on top of the names on top of the department affiliation are not harmonizing. I expect to see more space around t...

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...

I’ve seen a few creative re-uses of fabric posters before, but Rolf Hut is the new champion of poster recycling. I think Clicking to enlarge is mandatory to appreciate this in its full spendour. This Netherlands site also promises to allow you to re-use your poster in equally creative ways. Hat tip to Elizabeth Sandquist. Hanna Isolatus ran a poll on Twitter that is relevant to the interests of this blog! Justify the text on a poster, or ragged right? With just a 2% difference, clearly the battle is set to rage on. I personally have no strong preference for a poster. Vivid Biology is a Twitter account from a scientific illustration studio of the same name that brings a strong graphics sensibility to illustrating biological facts. The approach that they bring is one that would work well for posters, too. Hat tip to Dan Tracy.

Today’s contributor is Jodene Pappas. This poster is a bit of a break from the usual natural science that we see here on the blog, for which I am grateful. Click to enlarge! My computer was not able to import the font correctly for the makeover I am about to show you. So the text does not quite represent what the author intended. But I wasn’t focused on the text, anyway. No, I want to talk about those arrows. Arrows generally represent not only a failure of design, but a public admission of that failure. It says, “I know I screwed up, and that the order doesn’t follow the normal reading rules.” The ethos of this blog, though, is to make things better. This means you work with what you have, and not always throw away the existing style. My first concern is that the arrows are darker than almost everything else on the page. And the dark blue fill isn’t represented anywhere else on the eposter. This makes them stand out optically more than almost everything else on the page. The first st...

Today’s poster comes to us courtesy of Catherine Chen, who was kind enough to share. Click to enlarge! Catherine supplied this in an editable file, so the easiest way to go through this critique is to show how this poster could change. The first thing that jumped out when I opened up the file is that title area. The longer I write this blog, the more interested I am in the titles of posters and how they are presented. Titles are just critically important. As I wrote last week (and before), nothing should compete with the title. Here, your eye is drawn to that big blue band running across the top, and not the title. It is arguably the most optically dominant thing on the entire poster. I kind of like the idea of the bar as a separator, but it needs to be smaller, opening up the space around the title. In addition to shrinking the bar,  I made other, less obvious tweaks. I shortened up the institutional addresses. Will anyone need a zip code while viewing a poster? Rather than footn...