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Desi Quintans was kind enough to contribute his EcoTAS 2017 poster this week. Click to enlarge! This is a sweet poster that I like a lot. It is not crowded; there is plenty of white space to separate everything. The use of wide margins and a few subtle reinforcing lines make the reading order clear: you read this across in rows. There are plenty of different colours. Even though there are lots of primary colours (red, blue, green, and so on), they are low key enough that the colours are not competing with each other. Instead, it feels very harmonious. The colours are used not just in the figures, but in the headings to make them pop and reduce the “greyness” of the text. There is only one place where I feel there was a missed opportunity. Unfortunately, it’s a critical one. It’s the title. The culprit is the photo background. The photo and the title are in the same orange to brown colour range. By making the text box transparent to let the photo show underneath, the contrast between ...

Today’s contribution comes from Richard McGee. Click to enlarge! Before I get to the critique, Richard has a word of warning for us. Here he is presenting his poster. See any differences in the photo below compared to what is above on your screen? For me, the right triangle and the bottom triangle are clearly different in the top image, but almost the same blue in the bottom one. Richard writes: The printer I went to couldn’t print it to the size I wanted. It ended up being smaller than anticipated. Also, the colours looked different on printing than I had expected, based on the computer screen and my trial run on A4 paper. This is why professional artists get proofs from the printer before going into production. Both the printer and artist should be sure that reproduction is as expected. Unfortunately, academics sometimes don’t have the time or money to go through a proofing stage. This also means that the text, which is mostly readable, in the top version gets lost in the printed ...

I am in San Francisco for the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting. At every meeting I go to, I am looking for trends in poster design, either good or bad. This year, I have noticed this on posters more than usual: poster titles that begin with some variant of "The effect of..." And no, "Impacts on" is not better. This is a bland, worthless phrasing for a title. Practically every scientific study is trying to find the effect of one variable on another. Surely you have some idea of what the likely effect is, either from your hypothesis or from your data, so why not tell us what the effect is? Do X increase Y? Does X decrease Y? Does X benefit Y or does X inhibit Y? If I might ancitipate the excuse -- that the conference abstract deadline is so far in advance that we don't know what the results are yet -- my reply is, "Change the title of your poster." There is nobody checking to ensure that your abstract title and printed poste...

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...

Today’s poster comes from Rachel Byrne . Click to enlarge! Rachel was kind enough to respond to my request to share this, which I think is just a delightful work. It demonstrates the old adage that necessity is often the parent of invention. This wasn’t supposed to be a poster. Rachel explains (lightly edited): To be completely honest I had applied for a talk at the 32 nd Mustelid Colloquium held in Lyon, but they didn’t have space so offered me a poster. That’s when I began to panic. I am just one year into my project and did not have any real statistic analysis (which I think is often present on posters). Because my topic is very much about parasites, I also was a little worried that a bunch of behavioural ecologists and mustelid enthusiasts wouldn’t be that interested/familiar with parasitology jargon, so I might have to spend half my poster space on definitions etc. As badgers live in underground burrow systems called setts, I wanted to use this as a way of laying out my po...

Today’s poster comes to us courtesy of Laura Steinmann, presented at the 2018 American Nurses Association conference . Click to enlarge! She writes: I developed a 4 foot by 8 foot poster which is crammed with great info, and that’s the problem. ... The poster is less data and more instructional, based on two publications I wrote to teach providers how to recognize asymmetry. Laura went on to say that she used a poster template provided on a commercial site. Coincidentally, the last talk I gave on posters, one of the questions from the end was about whether I knew any sites with good poster templates. This is a good example of why I try to steer people away from templates. People slap up templates that are... not necessarily very good. Let’s look at just the template background, with the content removed: The space alloted for the title and author is tiny . The space between the columns, and the margins around them, are also tiny . A poster maker would be better served if those areas we...

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...