Lessons from sabre-toothed cats

 Look at this beautiful art by Yuefeng Song.

What’s lovely about this is not just the illustration, but that it is Figure 6 in technical paper in an academic journal. It’s not done just for press releases or social media or some other more media to promote the paper. It is in the version of record, and that’s wild. 

Academic journals are normally conservative and slightly staid. 

It a little subversive to have an illustration that unabashedly embraces a Chinese artistic tradition in a British journal.

A recurring problem with posters is the sameness many have. One of the goals of this blog is to showcase new graphic design possibilities for posters. I’ve tried to think about how other cultures might approach posters – with different forms of writing and design traditions. (I spent a long time looking for a conference poster in any language besides English.)

And an illustration like the one above reminds me of how limited my own view is. Because even when I think about trying to push the envelope, I usually am thinking about doing so in a context of Western culture.

There is no reason that conference posters couldn’t embrace other artistic traditions than “modern Western realism.” 

Well, I take that back. There are some reasons. People can be sensitive about using artistic styles when an artist or presenter does not belong to the culture that developed and uses that style. I suspect that people are more likely to complain about this when the imitation is done poorly and without respect than when it’s done with craft and care.

Hat tip to Natalia Jagielska. As Natalia notes, “‘Realism’ is a style. ... I do not understand the current aversion to different “styles” in scientific visual art.”

Reference

Qigao Jiangzuo et al. 2025. A new ecomorph of Nimravidae, and the early macrocarnivorous niche exploration in Carnivora. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 292(2059): 20251686. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1686 

In poster syndrome

 

From Pedro Veliça on LinkedIn.

Critique: Lumbar party

I want to thank Sasha Aspinall for sharing this award winning poster. Click to enlarge!

Sasha wrote (lightly edited):

I presented this poster at a back and neck pain conference in Quebec City. I’m really proud of it, and drew a lot of inspiration from your blog. I was surprised that it won best student poster, and I attribute a lot of that to the design.

I put a lot of work into the design, in particular trying to make it visually interesting since its a topic that doesn’t really lend itself easily to engaging visuals. 

I found the graphic on the top right corner on a stock image site, Because it was a vector graphic I was able to change the colours in it fairly easily. I then built the rest of the poster around that to play on the comic book style of the graphic.

Unfortunately, the first time I had it printed the printers got the margins all wrong. On the second print they got the margins correct but somehow small light green rectangles appeared within the green heading boxes, and I didn’t have time to get it reprinted a third time. I attached a pic of what it looked like once printed. 😊

Lots of good design choices here. The poster:

• Says the main conclusion in the title.
• Keeps lots of white space.
• Could be read in a few minutes.
• Directly labelled graphs. 
• Has a clearly signposted summary for someone who wants the bottom line.

I have just few things that I might have tried.

The typeface for the bulk of the text is Eras Light. This font, designed in 1976, is well known and well used. I worry that the Light weight fades out a little at a distance. 

There is a Book weight for Eras that might have been worth trying. 

 

The yellow emulates the style of classic comics. It works great in the title bar and “Final word”. But  the yellow in Figure 2 is a little too light. I might have tried a different colour that was a little higher contrast.

And because I’m a comics fan and a little picky, the word balloon at top might be a bit more effective if the pointer was aimed more at the speaker’s face than his elbow. Reminder: You can buy professionally made word balloons that are used by actual comics creators! (Links below.)

Always pleased to show the work from another satisfied customer!

External links

Comicraft word balloons

Blambot word balloons  

Grids and gestures and posters

I watched this video about comics.

I wasn’t aware of Nick Sousanis before. In his introductory remarks, he briefly describes a teaching exercise he uses called “Grids and gestures.” In a technical paper, Sousanis (2015) wrote: 

In comics, not only are we concerned with what goes on in each frame or panel, but we also need to attend to the size and shape of individual panels, their orientation, and their placement within the overall composition and relationship to other elements of the page(.)

It struck me that this is something that is so missing from thinking about conference posters, even in my own writing.

Posters, like comics, are often made with distinct panels, but makers are mostly concerned about what goes into the panels, rather than how the shape, size, and placement of the panels themselves could show information.

Here’s an example: an old Little Nemo in Slumberland page. Think about what those ever lengthening panels signify,

Or this famous page from The Amazing Spider-Man #33. 

Those four panels could be all the same size. But making that last panel so big shows that is a pivotal moment.

Poster makers can practice those layout skills using Sousanis’s grids and gestures exercise. It goes like this.

1. Take a page of paper and something to write with. The page is going to show one day. It could be today, yesterday, a memorable day, any day you want.
2. Divide the page into panels that represent parts of that day. 
3. In each panel, put something that represents the feeling of that part of the day. 

Here is just one example Sousanis got from one of his students. This shows this isn’t an exercise in drawing or technical draftsmanship.

 I think you can make some guesses about how someone’s day went.

To adapt this to a conference poster, we might ask, “What does the shape of this project to this point look like?”

Was there a long boring grind? Was there a big “A-ha!” moment? How would that look on a page like above? Can you capture some of that in the final poster?

Related posts

Put your favourite data in the spotlight 

Reference

Sousanis Nick. 2015. Grids and gestures: A comics making exercise. SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education 2(1): 8. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/vol2/iss1/8

External links

Grids and gestures

Critique: Glowing dust

Friend of the blog Natalia Asari has already shared a poster with us. But It’s been a while, so you might ask, what else has Natalia been up to? Click to enlarge! 

Natalia wrote:

This poster was for a conference which switched from being in-person to completely online. I did it in landscape mode, which is better for computer screens. In Brazil and Europe the room for posters is usually for a A0 poster in portrait format, so this is probably what it would have been were the conference held in person in an alternate timeline with no pandemic in 2020.

The colour scheme of the poster is inspired in the colour maps I used in my plots. I used Pages because, well, I am familiar with it. I tried Inkscape once, but I did not allow enough time to get it working properly and gave up. The problem with posters is that I usually make one once in a blue moon (say, once every two years), while I give talks much more often. So I have not honed my posters skills a whole lot.

In that conference, flash talks for posters should be at most 2:30 minutes, and had to be pre-recorded. Here is mine:

https://youtu.be/OsJVbKDWGu4

It took me a couple of tries to get it short. It is much more difficult than in person, but I think this is the same lesson I have learned teaching remote classes this year and organising remote meetings and supervision. 

This is a perfectly respectable poster. I would try to make the text blocks in the “less than the sum of its parts” section equally wide. Currently, the line length on the left is noticeably longer than the line length on the right.

Thanks to Natalia for sharing her online poster design and experience!

Related posts

Critique: Stellar populations 

External links

Natalia Vale Asari home page 

Critique: Bang your head

We have two posters today from contributor Nicole Ackermans! This first poster is from a Mount Sinai Annual Neuroscience Retreat. Click to enlarge!

Excellent concision in the text. This poster is about 300 words long.

This poster impresses with the simplicity of the text, which could carry over into its visuals. The background are the glowing effect on the title are making the poster look complicated when it isn’t.

The picture of the muskoxen provides an entry point for a viewer. I wish it was a bit bigger and clearer. The dark fur against the dark background reduces its impact. A white background, like the other graphs, might have helped. Here’s a quick mock-up.

Personally, I would have put all the headings in a row, rather than sometimes above, sometimes below the pictures. Consistency is helpful. Having the pictures above the text puts the graphics closer to eye level.

One thing you cannot see in the image above, though, is the very useful visual aid that went with the poster.

Skulls are cool.

Nicole’s second poster is from the Experimental Biology conference.

This poster is even shorter and sweeter than the first: only about 200 words! Much better contrast across the board, so it looks as crisp as it reads.

The only thing I question is the sideways section headings. I have come around to the point that generally you don’t want people to have to read sideways or tilt their heads if you can help it. But since each is only one word, and those words are the super familar “IMRaD” headings, it’s fine. 

Nicole assures me that posters were two to a board. She wasn’t leaving all that poster space unused!

I thank Nicole for letting me show her posters!

Critique: Got water?

Today’s contributer is Antonia Hadjimichael. She sent a pair, presented in no particular order. They were both presented at the American Geophysical Union in the same year. You can click the enlarge the first...

...Or the second!

 Antonia wrote:

I don’t get to do posters often and it was an exciting challenge!

For someone who doesn’t do posters often, she certainly rose to the challenge! What strikes me about both is that these show better than average design choices. It’s clear from the colours, and the integration of text and graphics.

Antonia did have a couple of constraints in creating these. The project’s sponsor wanted the logo on the top left and mandated the blue-green-blue banner. 

I was surprised by the word count. The first poster is about 800 words, and the second is about 700. That’s probably around average for this conference (Faulkes 2023), but because the main text is set quite small, I would have guessed the word count to be well over a thousand. I would look for places on both to reclaim space and increase text size. 

I do appreciate the effort to make the first poster more skimmable by bolding for emphasis.

Let’s continue with top poster for a minute. Antonia has tried a couple of other things to increase the readability.

 

The poster do not use the common “Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion” format, which is good. I recently wrote about the “complete assertion headings” format, and this comes very close to that style. “Regional-scale model underrepresents sub-basin variability” is a clear statement. “Modeling across scales,” though, is a fragment, and not as helpful.

Another way the poster tries to make itself more readable is by including a “Main findings” section. Excellent idea! But the “Main findings” section is too subdued visually.  

Look at the colour, weight, and case of “Main findings”: low contrast, thin stroke, sentence case.

Look at the colour, weight, and case of the other headings: high contrast, bold, and ALL CAPS.

The callout box for the “Main findings” helps, but it’s not enough. The low visibility heading and low value right corner makes this easy to overlook.

Because the section headings come close to summarizing the poster, it might be worth removing the “Main findings” section and hitting those three points in the section headings. The last section heading is the first main finding, so the task is already one third done.

Let’s go on to the second poster.

 

Like the first poster, this one has a lot of visual complexity.

The poster tries to provide signposts about the order that it is meant to be read in. It works! It works with maybe one exception. 

The placement of “This study addresses two questions” suggests it’s the second section of the poster.

But the numbered circular arrow leads to a graph, which overlaps with the callout, “This study addresses two questions.” The overlap signals that it’s part of the callout, read before you start at the number 1 end of the arrow. But being at the end of the arrow suggests the graph is to be read last.

The lower left corner is another place that has a lot going on. Methods are always one of those things that people are reluctant to cut. I appreciate the effort to convey the methodology visually, but I am not sure how much value the icons and detailed descriptions are bringing. Maybe “Use 20,000 core hours
to perform 600,000 model executions” is important, but as someone not in this space, it seems a little superfluous.

Likewise, I am not sure the SQL icon brings any more clarity than “SQL” written in the heading above it. Same goes for some of the other icons. I would try just having the headings for points 3 and 4, to clear up some space.

Thanks to Antonia for sharing her work!

Related posts

Making statements with section headings on your conference poster

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2023. The “wall of text” visual structure of academic conference posters. Frontiers in Communication 8: 1063345. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1063345