flynn0013

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...

Today’s poster is a contribution from Antje Girndt, who presented this at the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) 2017 meeting in Groningen, the Netherlands. Click to enlarge! Antje was kind enough to write her own analysis of this poster: It uses a Dutch colour theme and comes with little text. The introduction is pushed to the bottom and I am almost not explaining the methods. QR codes link to my profile and the accompanying data and script at the Open Science Framework. ... I like my final product but at the same time, I am not fully satisfied. The lower bit with the bullets, affiliations and references somehow bugs me, but I cannot pinpoint why. Antje’s approach is very much in line with the style I have been moving towards lately: make a simple, big statement up top. I think it could have been an even stronger title if the title said “why it matters.” Maybe something like “Sampling methods affect bird sperm data” or “Bird sperm should only be collected with one method...

Most of the time, I think my poster aesthetic might be described as Swiss style. That’s the period that saw the creation of Helvetica, for instance. It’s a style that is very spare and very organized , with lots of emphasis on grids. You can see it in this poster I made for the American Society for Parasitologists meeting in 2014. Click to enlarge! This was a noble, but in my mind, failed experiment. I wanted someone to get the main point of the poster by reading across the top row. I wanted people to get the supporting details in each column. It kind of works, kind of doesn’t. The top row works best because it is all photos. The graphics in the rows below that are not consistent enough to make the idea work. The text block in the bottom right doesn’t follow through with the lines established in the two rows above, and the three images to the left of it. I still like using huge numbers to bring home the main difference in infection rates between the two species instead of a graph. Si...

Best repurposing of a conference poster for the month goes to Wendy Yoder : (For something on this Internet, this blog has not had enough cats.) Hat tip to Colin Purr ington. A collection of awesome seminar posters at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I may have featured these on the blog before... but there have been more since then, so it’s worth revisting. Yun Tao (via Holly Bik ) observed: Our current crappy seminar posters (word doc, comic sans) trivialize the gravitas/seriousness of seminars. Hat tip to Jenny Merritt and Dr. Becca. Quote of the month from Benjamin Mazer : “So you have to make a poster for the science fair? Didn’t you do that in elementary school?” – my mother, clearly not an academic. Sparklines are mini graphs inserted into text, created by Edward Tufte. Now it’s easier than ever to create them with a special typeface . It’s called ATF Spark . Hat tip to Dr. Becca . Typography jokes : Hat tip to Janet Stemwedel. If you have anxiety about attending conf...

Some projects show up as posters at conferences, and then are neatly converted and are published as journal papers soon after. My newest paper (Faulkes 2017)... did not happen that way. The bulk of the paper never got presented at a conference. I featured bits and pieces of my new paper on an Ecological Society of America poster, way back in 2012. I wasn’t even there for that meeting; I had my co-author put it up. Now that I have some distance between that meeting, it’s a good time to review how it’s held up. Click to enlarge!   This was a big poster; seven and a half feet wide! The graphs in this paper shows up as Figure 4 in Faulkes (2017). But one bit, the crab at the bottom of the third column, made it into a separate paper earlier (Faulkes 2014). Looking back, that picture was a bad choice. One thing I think I still like is the repetition in the four central columns: they all have a map above and a graph below, and a little explanatory text underneath. The picture in the th...

Contributor Abigail Kelly is the maker of today’s poster. She bemoans that she never gets feedback on them. Well... we aim to please here on the Better Posters blog. Click to enlarge! I hate to say it, but Abigail’s poster shows the lack of feedback. There are many problems that I have featured on the “Key posts” on the blog’s sidebar. Uneven columns, contributing to unclear reading order. (Do I go across in rows, or down?) Very narrow margins , and noticeable uneven ones, too. Boxes around everything. A barrage of bullet points . The bullets are disproportionately large, and not aligned with the first line of text, as is standard. Uneven logos bookending the title. The tables are in a data prison . Vague and generic title. My first thought was that the best approach to this poster was to blow it up, take it as a lesson learned, and start over. But my second thought was, “That’s not in the spirit of the blog.” The spirit of this blog is that you can always find ways to make an exist...

Today’s poster was sent in by kindly contributor David Selby. It was created for the useR! conference in Brussels earlier this year. Click to enlarge! The main data visualization gives this poster a strong graphic element at its core. The visulizations almost look like abstract art. David did the right thing by making these as big as possible. You wouldn’t be able to interpret these otherwise. David has skillfully mixed both a serif and sans serif font in the type in a way that is not distracting. There may be a mild problem with reading order. Looking at the text, this was the pattern I expected to follow: Instead, I realized that I was supposed to go like this: In fairness, the acknowledgements can be skipped, so I don’t have to drag my eyes all the way back to the lower left. But still, I was confused when I realized that black of text was acknowledgement. “Wait, I’m not supposed to read this yet!” David was very clever to link the “Web of Science” data and “Statistics” data usin...