Link roundup, September 2011

The Scientist has a substantive article called “Poster perfect” on the art of conference poster, with many good tips, including some that I haven’t covered here yet! I like this one:

Temporarily dump your text

A good way to test to see whether your graphics are serving their intended purpose: “If you removed all the info besides the graphics, the poster should still be pretty good,” says Purrington. “Scientists are lazy, they don’t read,” says marine biologist Nando Boero, from the Università del Salento in Lecce, Italy. The graphs should tell the whole story, he says.

Sarcozona shares her advice for making awesome posters:

Posters are a bit like haiku – you’ve got a very small amount of space and not a lot of flexibility in structure, but you need to get across a whole lot.

ChemBark provides his advice for printing posters. He notes that giving a poster, you’re less likely to get the short shrift if you give a talk near the very, very end of the conference.

Thursdays at the ACS are like the 30 minutes before closing (at a restaurant) when the waitresses are vacuuming the carpet and giving you the stinkeye to leave.

Garr Reynolds does a more in depth look at the issue of how our gaze can be directed by faces, which I covered here.

Looking for some placeholder text that isn’t so, you know, old? Try Hipster ipsum. Or journo ipsum.

A lively interview with Simon Garfield, the author of the book Just My Type, about fonts. Great stories! (But see here for a review that warns that the stories my be just a bit too glib.)

Can typography make you a better lover? Maybe not, but Seth Godin notes that good typography sure made a difference to Apple:

Typography is what sets Apple, at first glance, apart from just about everyone at the mall. Typography is what makes a self-published book often look pale in comparison to a ‘real’ one. ...

The choice of a typeface, the care given to kerning and to readability—it all sends a powerful signal. When your business card is nothing but Arial on a piece of cardboard, you’ve just told people how they ought to think about you… precisely the opposite of what you were trying to do when you made the card in the first place.

Speaking of Apple, here is a bit more on the famous story of Jobs taking a calligraphy class:

The (calligraphy) course was founded in 1969 by Lloyd Reynolds, an English professor who grew up in a struggling eastern Washington farming community. ... His calligraphy course was immediately and enormously popular, often standing room only — for while Reynolds nominally taught lettering and the history of lettering, he was by all accounts a brilliant and iconoclastic instructor, and the course was full of lessons in Everything Else.

“For Reynolds, calligraphy wasn’t merely a craft, nor even just an art — it was civilization,” former student Chuck Bigelow told me in an email. “By studying the art of writing, you gained access not only to the content of texts, but also the cultures that produced them.”

Lastly, a bit of beautiful design that’s all too easily overlooked.