Link roundup, May 2012

Colin Purrington has a template for conference posters. Regular readers will see a lot of things that I suggest here. The major difference is that he spreads the “fine print” all along the bottom, whereas I tend to favour the bottom right corner.

I normally don’t normally like animated GIFs, but in these case, I’ll make exceptions: “What I feel like when my poster is the best one in the row.” And “When my poster wins an award."

In praise of margins.

Don’t be afraid to do something that you’ve seen elsewhere:

So much poor design has been made in the pursuit of “originality,” “creativity,” and “grabbing the viewer” (don’t try this in person).

For instance, what if someone felt the need to make every stop sign unique?

Think you know serifs from sans serifs? Prove it! It’s harder than you think when you’re under the gun to use the gun... I Shot the Serif is a cute little online game (even though the pun is past its use by date).

Stripped Science looks at ancient poster sessions.

DrugMonkey asks what kind of poster do you want to see at a poster session? He prefers them a little rough around the edges.

An infographic generator. Use it wisely. In particular, see this critique from Flowing Data (my emphasis):

I'm having trouble getting on board with these tools. Easel.ly, for example, provides themes, such as the one on the right. There's a guy in the middle with graphs around him and pointers coming out of his body. You get to edit however you want.

So in this case, you start with a complete visual and then work your way backwards to the data, which I'm not sure how you can edit other than manually changing the size of the graphs. (Working with the interface takes some patience at this stage in the application's life.) It's rare that good graphics are produced when you go this direction.

There is a new typeface coming that is intended to make the area of a number (from 1 to 999) in proportion to its value. The planned name? FatFont. (May require registration / subscription to read).

A big ol’ Prezi on poster presentations.

If you’re an organizer of a small conference, you might want to have a look at this post on speakers behaving badly. Sigh. People suck.

Sibling blog to this one, NeuroDojo, makes a cameo appearance at Context and Variation, which has some great insight into poster designs.

I asked students to share what they liked and didn’t like. Why was one poster successful where another wasn’t? In a few cases disciplinary biases impacted the posters they liked, but most of the time their preference was driven by design features. The posters that were striking, confident and accessible were the clear favorites.