flynn0013

Your blogger is extra busy this week, and only has time to steal this cartoon from Red Pen / Black Pen on Twitter . Click to enlarge!

Today’s contribution comes from Parisa Mehran, PhD student at Osaka University. This poster was presented at EUROCALL2018 , but talks a lot about what went down at EUROCALL2017 . You can read that story here , but as for the poster itself? Click to enlarge! The upper left side is blank on purpose to hold some documents that Parisa clipped to the poster. You can see this in her picture below, from her Facebook post about this: The poster’s biggest successes are the organization and the colours. The poster is clearly meant to be read in rows. Using gray bars to separate elements within rows means that the break between them is less conspicuous than the black bars between rows, so your eyes group the rows together. Yellow has the advantage of being a bright colour that is naturally light enough that you can readily read black text on top of it. The boldness of colour fits with the boldness of the thick sans serif type. I like the type choice here so much that I wish it was used througho...

Today’s contributor is A.Z. Andis , who is sharing an award-winning poster presented at Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Click to enlarge! This won the Victor Hutchinson Outstanding Poster award in the most popular category! What leaps (no frog pun intended) out at you with this poster is the discipline in the colour palette. We are using black, and we are using green, the text is white, and you will like it ! This brings so much cohesion to the poster. The first section of the poster (“Introduction”) is placed further right than the second section (“Experiment”), which violates our normal reading expectation. But at least readers get warned of this, because the sections are numbered. The varying widths of the text and images takes away a little of the cleanliness of the layout. Visually, it is unclear if the box with the white background belongs to the “Experiment” section or the “Results” section. The rotation of words is an interesting way of emphasizing key wo...

Always fascinated by what happens to posters after the conference, particularly posters in the hands of crafty people. Beth Stuart says of her poster quilt: I’m not sure this version is any worse at communicating science than the original. Hat tip to Katy Kennedy . • • • • • As part of a larger argument about public engagement, Bex writes : Imagine if our poster sessions were held in public transport stations and you had to explain your research to commuters - and have an eye-catching poster! If anyone does this experiment, let me know! • • • • • Nice thread from Tracey Weissgerber on graph design. It’s based on this article from 2015 , so I’ve probably mentioned it before in this blog. • • • • • Speaking of complex graphs, Predromics has purrfected the box-and-whisker plot: Hat tip to Ai Lyn Tan . • • • • • I’m had to ask Alisha Oshlack what a “rapid fire poster” is. But the Genome International 2018 me...

Today’s poster comes from Jennifer Pannell. Click to enlarge! Before I get into some details, Jennifer noted that this poster isn’t exactly the way she wanted it to look: I had some problems with the font, though. Scribus won’t embed them and so they look terrible unless you zoom in 100%, so it might look terrible as a png. I don’t know if the export problem might explain a few little issues, like dumb quotes instead of curly quotes. Or that there are lines after paragraphs on the left, but not the bottom right. “Fig” should probably have a period after it throughout. Jennifer’s poster has a clear two column format, with some attractive graphics to bring the casual browsers on board. There are some positioning choices I find odd, though. There is more open space on this poster than many I see, which is good, yet somehow items still seem to end up feeling crammed together. For example, here’s a close up on the upper right corner: There is open space around the images of the bird, and th...

Today’s contribution is a prize-winning poster from Alexandra Lai! This was presented at the International Aerosol Conference . Click to enlarge! The title bar is particularly well done. It’s an excellent example of a clear visual hierarchy: the title is biggest and in bold. A subtitle is big, but not bold. The authors are smaller, and the affiliations are smaller yet. And the type is fits the space, so there isn’t a lot of empty space on the right corner. The colour scheme is a little busy, but generally works. The main oranges in the title and callout boxes and blue in the background are contrast colours. The colurs in the graphs might benefit from being a little more harmonized with the two main colours. Some of the greens and pinks don’t seem to fit that well. Alexnadra has done a good job with the typography here. The font is clean, the emphasis is clear, and the table is not a mess of lines. In the Methods, I might like to see fewer words, but the words are set out in a very rea...

Posters are like muffins. The top is so much better than the bottom. In muffins, the top is better because of the wonders of caramelization , and because that’s where it’s the easiest to put on ingredients like chocolate chips, glaze, fruit peeling, cream cheese, or what have you. The bottom of muffins are just okay in comparison. It’s not surprising that there are many products that are designed to give people only the delicious muffin tops and not the less appetizing muffin stumps. In posters, the top half is better because it’s sitting at or above eye level. The title is above eye level, which is important because it moves the title above most people’s heads so it can be seen from a long way away. The space underneath the title sits right around typical eye levels, and that’s where people look the most. Put as much of the good stuff on your poster in that top half. Your big, important question, hypothesis, or prediction. Your sexist, biggest result. Your bold interpretation or co...