Better Posters

Link roundup, January 2012

2012-01-26T07:00:00.000-06:00

Neil Withers has an editorial in Nature Chemistry called “In praise of posters.” I’m particularly grateful for something I’ve wondered about: the origin of poster sessions.

But once upon a time there must have been meetings without posters. So when was the first poster and who came up with the idea? Sadly, it looks as though history (or at least, as it is indexed by Google, Web of Science and other such databases) has not recorded the exact moment for us to celebrate. As far as we can tell, however, the idea originated in Europe, perhaps because the range of languages spoken meant it would be a good idea to have a session where delegates could absorb information in a non-native language at their own pace. The phenomenon was only reported in North America in 1974 at the Biochemistry/Biophysics Meeting in Minneapolis. Not that Americans were slow to embrace the visual, however. The American Chemical Society then introduced poster sessions for the fall national meeting, in Chicago in 1975, a move that resulted in some 41 presentations (take a bow, Divisions of Chemical Education and Inorganic Chemistry). What’s more, the session was seen as a ‘trail blazer.’

The article also has some great links, such as this one, which asks, “What makes a good poster?”, and presents a good case that posters are often superior forms of communication over talks. (And if you look close, you’ll see a cameo appearance by this blog.)

Ed Yong discusses how to make a great conference.

Rig things so that the most passionate people show up.

Arrange everything so that they have nothing to distract them from the business of talking to each other.

Equalise everything.

Critique: The Marlborough Fault System

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000-06:00

This week, we have a lovely geology poster submitted for review from Jana Mittelstädt.

This poster is successful because it only tries to do one thing: present a case for a new hypothesis to explain a geological feature. And it makes its case through one large, detailed graphic.

My only suggestions for improvement would be a few minor changes at the top of the poster. That there is ample blank space at the bottom of the poster means that some of the material at the top could be enlarged without crowding the rest.

The labels, “Previous interpretation” and “New hypothesis” are far smaller than their importance warrants. People are going to look in that upper left corner first, and by enlarging the labels above the green maps, you would let them known in an instant the case that you are trying to make on this poster.

Similarly, the callout under the second map seems a little too understated, although it might be more legible on the printed poster.

Finally, the text in the upper right is large enough, but would benefit from some paragraph indents and half a line, or line, of space to separate the text.

If you have a poster you’re proud of, email me! I’m particularly interested in posters from sciences besides my own (biology), and academic disciplines besides science.

Don’t make errors in your error bars

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000-06:00

Comparing averages should be one of the easiest kinds of information to show, but they are surprisingly tricky.

Most people know that when they show an average, there should be an indication of how much smear there is in the data. It makes a huge difference to your interpretation of the information, particularly when glancing at the figure.

For instance, I’m willing to bet most people looking at this...

Would say, “Wow, the treatment is making a big difference compared to the control!”

I’m likewise willing to bet most people looking at this (which plots the same averages)...

Would say, “There’s so much overlap in the data, there might not be any real difference between the control and the treatments.”

The problem is that error bars can represent at least three different measurements (Cumming et al. 2007).

Standard deviation
Standard error
Confidence interval

Sadly, there is no convention for which of the three one should add to a graph. There is no graphical convention to distinguish these three values, either. Here’s a nice example of how different these three measures look (Figure 4 from Cumming et al. 2007), and how they change with sample size:

I often see graphs with no indication of which of those three things the error bars are showing!

And the moral of the story is: Identify your error bars! Put in the Y axis or in the caption for the graph.

Reference

Cumming G, Fidler F, Vaux D 2007. Error bars in experimental biology The Journal of Cell Biology 177(1): 7-11. DOI: 10.1083/jcb.200611141

A different problem with error bars is here.

Free maps!

2012-01-05T11:24:00.001-06:00

Indiemapper, an online mapping program that I discussed before, is now free for all to use.

I was using it earlier this week. I continue to be impressed with this project. It’s straightforward to import *.kml files from Google Maps or Google Earth, and to export high resolution images from maps.

Related posts

Do I have to draw you a map?

The story behind a symposium

2012-01-05T07:00:00.001-06:00

Last week, I announced a symposium that I am co-organizing for next year’s International Congress of Neuroethology at the University of Maryland over on my main blog, NeuroDojo. It’s titled “Nociceptors in the real world.”

My partners in this venture are Ashlee Rowe (at the University of Texas in Austin) and Ewan St. John Smith (you can listen to him on the Science podcast talking about why naked mole rats don’t feel pain from acids).

What I didn’t mention on my main blog is how the symposium came together. It started in a poster session.

In particular, this symposium for next year’s Neuroethology meeting started at the last meeting in 2010.

Before the conference, I had checked for other posters on the topic I was presenting on (nociception). Out of several hundred posters, there were four: myself and three others. The good news was that we had been placed together, so we were able to see each other’s work easily. But in the back of my mind, I was sort of chewing on the fact that this topic was not well represented at this meeting.

This poster session was... compact. You were elbow-to-elbow with the people next to you, and because the poster boards were zig-zagging across the floor, it was very difficult to have to facing posters being presented at the same time. This meant you sort of had to cooperate with people who had posters next to you to be able to show off your work at all. And we were so close, it was extraordinarily easy to strike up a conversation. I loved the work that Ashlee and Ewan had on their posters (you can see a bit of Ashlee’s poster behind me in the picture above).

At some point, all this coalesced in my head into an idea. I went over to them and said, “We should do a symposium on nociception at the next congress!”

They liked the idea. And that got the whole ball rolling.

A lot of emails and Google Doc sharing and invitations later, and we’re going to have a symposium at the next meeting, and I’m super excited about it. The meeting is 5-10 August 2012. Mark your calendars if you’re interested in nervous systems, animal behaviour, or evolution!

If we had got up and given three straight slide presentations in a row instead of standing next to each other for a few hours at that poster session, it would not have happened.

And that’s today’s reason why I love poster sessions.

Because stuff gets done there.

Links

Blogging from International Congress for Neuroethology in Salamanca, 2010

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4-5
Conferences and cathedrals

Link roundup, December 2011

2011-12-29T07:00:00.001-06:00

Trust someone from a mathematical science institute to think outside the box by creating a box. It’s a 3-D poster! Also known as, a, er, cube. Winner of the most interesting thing on conference posters I’ve seen this month. Read the whole story on the Cosmology at AIMS blog.

A post from 2007 on justifying text that is still relevant. Making justified text look good is a tricky business.

So many ways to abuse pie charts...

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2011-12-22T07:00:00.001-06:00

Last year, I posted the instructions for turning conference posters into a winter wonderland. But I left it too close to Christmas, and nobody noticed. This year, I plugged the instructions earlier in December, and it got a lot more attention than last year. As a result...

I got this one from Brian Dranka:

As for me, this poster (featured back in May):

Got turned into this:

There was still something missing, though...

Aaaaah. That’s better.

Merry Christmas, and happy holidays!

Board numbers

2011-12-15T07:00:00.000-06:00

Dear conference organizers:

If you’re going to mount big numbers of poster boards in such a way that the poster presenters can’t easily move them around (like, say, stapling them to the board), make sure you tell your presenters the size of the board minus the size that the poster number takes up.

An actual poster board may be 48 by 72 inches. But if the board number is 4 by 8 inches, that effective working space for the poster maker is 44 by 66 inches.

Burn your tables

2011-12-08T07:00:00.000-06:00

A new paper provides empirical evidence for something that many people, like Edward Tufte, have been saying for years: graphs and figures are better than tables.

Cook and Teo took the results of statistical simulations, and presented them to people in the form of graphs or tables. Everyone were able to answer questions about the data more quickly using a graph. Less experienced people (i.e., undergraduates compared to postgraduates) were able to make more accurate statements about the results when presented in a graph rather than a table.

They note that many journals print tables that make matters even worse. Tables often have far too many significant digits, and readers are often asked to make comparisons horizontally, rather than vertically.

If you are thinking of putting a table on your poster: burn it.

Reference

Cook A, Teo S. 2011. The communicability of graphical alternatives to tabular displays of statistical simulation studies. PLoS ONE 6(11): e27974. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027974

Photo by cranky messiah of Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Fabric posters in the wild

2011-12-01T07:00:00.001-06:00

I saw more fabric posters at Neuroscience 2011 than I had seen at other meetings. This was no doubt due to the larger contingent of international visitors who wanted the better portability than big clunky document tubes.

But how do fabric posters perform on the conference room floor? Not as well as paper.

Compared to paper posters, fabric posters:

Don’t lie as flat. Fabric posters are shipped to you, folded, in a box. They’ve got creases in them when you take them out of the box. Folds and creases mean that there will be shadows running all over your poster, unless you are blessed with phenomenal lighting conditions. Details can get easily obscured by the dark spots. This might be alleviated if you put in the effort to iron your poster before heading to the conference center.

Don’t count on pulling the corners taut with tacks to save you. Fabric stretches, even the sort of light weave used for printing, so I expect getting those creases out just by tight tacking is incredibly difficult. Fabrics want to wrinkle and sag; paper doesn’t.

Aren’t as bright. The fabric posters I walked by looked a little dimmer and lower contrast than paper posters. I’d written before about the sharpness of images on fabric posters, but the conferences I had seen them in were much smaller than Neuroscience, and I was generally closer to the posters than when I was browsing through the Neuroscience halls.

If you make a fabric poster, everything must be bigger and bolder than paper. Bigger text, bigger figures, and high contrast colours. Don’t mess around with subtleties.

P.S.—I don’t have any pictures of these posters from Neuroscience, because the Society for Neuroscience was very... emphatic... about forbidding picture taking and recording from the floor of the poster session.

Related posts

Cut from whole cloth
Fade out

Picture by softestthing on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Note: This post was in the queue before Gerty Z wrote her blog post about fabric posters.

Square it up

2011-11-24T07:00:00.000-06:00

Posters are big and cumbersome, and hanging them up yourself is tricky. You have to unroll it, stick a tack in one of the upper corners. Then you have go try to stick a tack in the other top corner, maybe two meters away, which is often longer than armspan for something above shoulder height.

Now step back and check that the top and bottom edges are horizontal.

Do not trust your instincts about the level line from when you stuck in that second tack. The upper corners of your posters are almost always above your eyeline, making it difficult to judge whether the poster is level or not.

If you think this goes without saying, I beg to differ. At Neuroscience recently, I was astonished at how many posters looked like they were taking on water on one side. These were not subtle little “one corner is higher” problems. I saw several that I guess were about five degrees off true.

The easiest way is to have a friend or colleague or helpful conference goer who is willing to step back and do the old, “Up a little bit... down a little... a little more... perfect!”

If there’s nobody else around, you can mount one edge of your poster flush with the posterboard. This has the downside that if can look a bit odd if your poster is much smaller than the posterboard, though.

Finally, since we are living in the future, there is, as they say, an app for that.

Photo by L. Marie on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

QR code subtleties

2011-11-22T10:55:00.001-06:00

The good men and women at Poster Session are on the ball. Here, they detail a whole bunch of issues with printing QR codes on posters that are... subtle.

It turns our that QR codes need to be of a certain size, depending on the length of the URL they are pointing to. Who knew?

An even more detailed analysis can be found here. As usual for posters, the solution is to make it big! (Also, testing the code at final printed size is probably a smart idea.)

Overdoing it

2011-11-18T07:00:00.000-06:00

Seen at Neuroscience: Someone using a laser pointer to point out stuff on his poster.

You're overdoing it, dude. Calm down and just point with your hands. Or maybe get yourself one of these.

Smart dingbats

2011-11-17T07:00:00.001-06:00

Dingbat has a double meaning: it can either mean ditzy or clueless, or it can mean icons and glyphs. Those geometric shapes are handy little devils in technical illustrations, and I’ve used them many times. Now, there’s a new set of dingbats in in town, and maybe they’ll help put the first meaning, because these are nothing if not smart.

For instance, if you look at Zapf Dingbats or Wingdings, you’ll see a circle with three radiating spokes, shown here in the upper left corner:

It’s reel-to-reel tape, something that was very much a specialty item when I was a kid. Admittedly, you don’t see many cassette tapes, but still, it’s a big step forward to a more contemporary and useful look.

For a full lowdown, read this article. You can download the new set at http://www.dingbatsfont.com/ for free. This is an amazing and generous deal for people working on any sort of information graphics.

Link roundup, November 2011

2011-11-10T07:00:00.000-06:00

Scicurious has poster advice gleaned from the big show, the Neuroscience meeting. I had my own advice here. I am just about to get on a plane to the Neuroscience conference, so expect loads of commentary from that in the days and weeks to come!

Speaking of conferences, here’s how to travel to a conference.

Software! It makes so much possible! And screws us over, too! What software do scientists use to put together the figures in their talks? There’s a poll that attempts to answer this question. No prizes for guessing the leader, with more users than the next two combined.

This article examines cognitive disfluency. This is something I keep meaning to write about here on the blog, as the idea of cognitive disfluency seems to argue for ugly.

From cognitive disfluence to cognitive dissonance... clever design can make even Hell seem appealing.

A nice example of simplicity in design.

You can tell Arial from Helvitica. But can you tell cheese from font? A hilarious little game.

Neuroscience 2011: advice in advance

2011-11-05T12:33:00.000-05:00

This week, I shall be at the annual Neuroscience meeting, which is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, scientific conferences, in the world.

A huge number of posters will be put together and printed this week. For those who do not want to have to dig through the last two and a half years of posts, here is a super quick guide to making your poster better.

The big tips

Shut up.

People want to read as little as possible. And at Neuroscience, who can blame them? There is more than any person can see, and big blocks of text scream, “This is going to take a long time!”

Show images whenever possible, especially pictures. Pictures of actual physical objects that people can recognize are always more inviting than graphs, which are generic and abstract.

Do your audience a favour: respect their time. Leave the fiddly bits for your dissertation or published paper.

Line up.

For the love of humanity, make a grid. Divide your poster up into evenly spaced pieces. Draw lines. Make every piece of text, every chart, every thing line up along those lines. Don’t just stick things here and there, or make them “almost” align. It looks sloppy.

Size up.

Make everything bigger. The text. The space between each line of text. The graphs. The labels on the graphs. Large size is a key factor in how long people will look at something. How do you know if it’s big enough? Does your poster pass the arm’s length test?

Free up.

Drawing boxes around everything is like putting your poster in prison. Solitary confinement is cruel. When your poster is well organized, all you need is white space to separate the sections.

Those are my main requests that can help make most posters better. Even I, with a lot of posters under my belt, forget these basics sometimes.

The next tips are things that can be ignored with a little practice and thought, but are good places to start.

You can’t go too far wrong with...

Black text on a white background

Black text on a white background works. You can do cool things with backgrounds if know what you are doing, but it’s easy to turn something looks horrible on a printed page. Most people should put away the gradient fills and the photo blow-ups, and stick with the tried and true colour scheme that you see in 99% of all books.

A three column layout

Photographers learned long ago that dividing things into three is pleasing. For big, wide posters, like Neuroscience, three columns may be too wide. If that’s the case, either create an off number of columns (five or seven), or subdivide your grid into smaller sections.

Sans serif typeface for the main text

Some suggestions for typefaces that are fairly easily available include Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Gill Sans,and Calibri. You may think these are boring because everyone uses them, but there is a reason people use them so much: they get the job done.

Personally, I like Gill Sans on posters. Its readability holds up at a distance.

Calibri – while a fine typeface – does convey a subtle message: “I can’t be bothered to change the default settings in Microsoft Office.”

And finally:

No frickin’ Comic Sans

Comic Sans says, “amateur.” You might be going for “humourous” or “approachable,” but you achieve that at the complete loss of the “professional” trait.

I’m not against fonts with a hand-drawn look. I am a big comic book fan. Many people could make their posters better by learning the lessons of comic books. But there are better comic book typefaces out there.

Do you have a poster at Neuroscience that you are proud of? Want to show it off? Get feedback? Or just chat? Email me! I will be at Neuroscience from Saturday, 12 November, to Monday, 14 November (and maybe part of Tuesday morning).

Unabashed plug! If this helped you, please consider supporting my scientific research.

Columns where ya want ‘em

2011-11-03T07:00:00.000-05:00

I’ve talked before about how much I like Microsoft Publisher for making conference posters. (Yes, even though the automatic alignment in the 2010 version is not great.)

When joining text across columns, though, sometimes you want what to force text to be at the top of the next column. For example, you may have a few extra inches at the bottom of one column, and you want to start a the next section at the start of the next column. You can do thing like just hitting enter and adding empty paragraphs until your heading is forced to the next column.

There is a better way.

Place your cursor on the paragraph you want to be at the top of your next column. Right click, and select “Change text,” and then “Paragraph.” Then. pick the “Line and paragraph breaks” tab (pictured). Check “Start in next text box.”

It’s the equivalent of a “page break” or “column break” in Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, the placing of the command, and the name, is not exactly standardized between the two programs.

Related posts

No more slidesters, part 2: Three Publisher tips
No more slidesters, part 6: Publisher 2010’s fall from grace

Poster versus talk, listening edition

2011-10-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

Many informal surveys have asked whether people like to give talks or posters, and talks are clear winner. I wanted to know, though, if the proportions for listening to a presentation were any different. So back in May, I started a poll on this (now removed). These are the results (click to enlarge):

Because this is a poster blog, you might think that posters would be favoured more here than in other polls, but no! Even the readers of this blog tend to prefer giving talks by almost a 2 to 1 margin. I don't know why, but I sort of expected posters might do better when people were on the receiving end of the information, because of the chance to talk to the presenter personally, ask more questions, have more interaction.

Nope. The proportion of people favouring posters actually dropped from about a third to about a quarter.

It’s sad that this form of communication is so common in academia when most people would rather give a talk. Perhaps this is more evidence that conference organizers need to be bolder and more daring in structuring their meetings, and not just following the format that other conferences do.

Critique: Stellar populations

2011-10-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

It’s a great thing to get an email like this one:

I am sending you the last poster I did, which I am finally proud of.

That was from Natalia Asari, who was kind enough to share her poster with us. I am particularly pleased to get this one, not just because of her pride in it, but because I know full well that many scientific disciplines are not well represented on this blog (yet!). An astronomy poster is such a nice change of pace.

Even before you click to enlarge, you’ll notice that it’s in “portrait” orientation (taller than wide). I personally find such posters to be very tricky to lay out, because my first response is to create a grid of vertical columns, and tall posters result in very skinny columns. Natalia beats that problem by putting everything in one column, with clear horizontal divisions to mark the different sections of evidence. The data are consistently on the left, and explanatory text is consistently on the right, and they have the same width throughout the poster, reinforcing a secondary grid.

The poster gets high marks for using so many colours without being distracting or jarring. I think part of the reason that this works is that the bright colours are confined to thin lines on a white background, so they are not competing for attention with the main body of the poster. The larger blocks of colour are subdued, neutral tones.

There is not a heck of a lot to critique in this poster, but I will highlight a few things in the next picture.

The use of the icons adds a light, almost humourous touch to the piece. The potential downside is that they can be too memorable. I always thought of this poster as having a dinosaur on it, which might be a trifle misleading, because there are no dinosaur data in the paper!

The icons are responsible for what I would see as the one “error” on the poster: on the bottom three, the brown banner behind the poster bleeds into the transparent white space within the icons. The icons would be stronger if the white space inside was opaque, so the brown behind was not visible within the icon.

Natalia made this poster in ~~Papers~~ Pages, which is not software I am familiar with. Has anyone else made posters with this software?

She described the reaction to this poster thus:

I did it for one of the Symposia in the last IAU General Assembly, in 2009, when I was finishing my Ph.D. It raised some eyebrows and I felt some people had a hard time taking it seriously. Once I started explaining the science to them however, they got over the shock of seeing such a different poster.

This is a great reminder that there can be pressure – perhaps subtle – to make the same old poster that everyone else has. One of the great things about posters is that there are so few rules. There main one is, “Make it fit on the posterboard.” Beyond that, don’t let people stop you from trying something better.

Thanks to Natalia for her generosity in sharing this stellar poster!

Link roundup, October 2011

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

If you’re the sort of person who likes futzing around with posters, maybe you should consider a career as a scientific illustrator or animator. This article has a look at this little known, but growing, field.

Looking for inspiration for how to make a graphic for your poster? Try the Nice Figure gallery of beautiful pictures from scientific papers.

A post from last year by Pascal Wallisch discusses the use of new technologies to bring posters to life, describing what he calls the “padster.” Also, don’t miss his link round-up of advice on how to attend a conference.

Because I love alternative placeholder texts, here’s one that you can use if you want your poster to have a bit of edge, Samuel L. Jackson style. Perhaps not best used if you are in a conservative workplace.

The floggings of scientists using Comic Sans on posters and presentations will continue until the practice is abandoned.

Mostly right

2011-10-06T05:00:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of elements to creating a scientific poster. What happens if you only miss one element?

Click to enlarge:

Inspired by the viral linkbait guide.

You need a symbologist

2011-09-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

The letter “X” is not a multiplication symbol. Not in its uppercase form, and not in its lowercase form, either. The multiplication sign looks like this: ×

A superscript letter “O” is not a degree sign. A degree looks like this: °

A lowercase “u” is not lowercase Greek letter mu, better known as the metric symbol for “micro-”. The micro- symbol looks like this: µ

And we can tell the difference.

If you use Microsoft Office, here’s the part of the ribbon you’re looking for:

Windows users can also open up the Character Map for even more symbols.

One major technical symbol that is missing, and which scientists often want to use, is the mean symbol. It looks like an x with a bar over the top. For some reason, the mean symbol is not in Unicode character sets, or in HTML, as far as I can find.

I have seen these kinds of mistakes on posters, and slides, and documents, many times.

These mistakes show that you don’t know how to use your tools. That is the definition of amateur. And wouldn’t you rather look like a professional than an amateur?

(Crossposted from NeuroDojo.)

Combining art and science: Karmella Haynes interview

2011-09-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

Back in June, Jonathan Eisen shared a poster unlike any I had ever seen before: a completely painted work of art.

I featured it here, and finally have a follow-up with the scientist behind it, Dr. Karmella Haynes.

Q: The obvious first question is, what gave you the idea to paint your conference poster? I know you’re an artist, but that’s still a fairly significant jump between the disciplines.

A: I've been painting and drawing since I was a kid; I keep a collection of my pieces on display at www.karmellahaynes.com. (“Traveling without moving” from that site pictured at right - ZF) Before I was certain that I wanted to be a scientist, I had already been doing some pretty advanced portraiture in oil and in acrylic. I continued to paint while in grad school, but only when I could find time. Today, I find outlets for artistic expression through my science. For instance, I design my own cover art entries. One was accepted by the Journal of Biological Chemistry (August 5 issue, “Synthetic reversal of epigenetic silencing,” shown below. - ZF)

Q: Were you nervous to have a poster that was so different from other conference posters?

A: Maybe a little. Some things that were going on in my career at the time emboldened me to try a painted poster. Although I was a postdoc in the Silver lab, I had acquired a position as a tenure-track professor (at Arizona State University) so I felt more independent. Also, the data on the poster had all been generated by me, so I didn’t have to get approval from a long list of co-authors. Pam (my P.I.) had always been supportive of my art and she’s a strong proponent of clever and bold ideas in general. Finally, I felt that a synthetic biology conference was the right place for it, since so many members of the syn bio community are iconoclasts, of sorts, and have an appreciation for creativity and aesthetics.

Q: Could you talk a bit about the process of making this particular poster? In particular, paint would not be a medium that I would have thought of as suitable for precise scientific data, like means with error bars. How did you do the graphs?

A: I had an unused 3' × 4' canvas laying around and a set of nice acrylic paint I had not touched in a while (science had kept me pretty busy). I created a lot of sketches to get the layout just right. I decided to go with a sort of surrealist still life of single cells (inspired by a Chihuly exhibit in Boston) and a clear petri dish, where some cells had red nuclei, so that it would be relevant to the data. For the data, the challenge was to represent the science well without relying too much on text, just like any digital poster, but even more so for the painting. I sketched the graphs and diagrams with pencil and a ruler, trying to get the sizes of everything as accurate as possible. What a lot of people don’t appreciate is the fact that graphs that were published in high profile journals were hand drawn by technical artists. But, in order to accurately present my data (it was a science conference after all), I made mini-posters on 8.5" × 11" paper as handouts.

Q: We know Jonathan Eisen loved the poster; how was the response from other attendees?

A: It got a lot of double takes and plenty of smiles and compliments. Many commented that it was the first time they had ever seen anything like it. It was very well received. I printed 50 handouts and ran out long before the poster session was over.

Q. Have you done more traditional posters, using illustration software? If so, what do you use?

A: Yes, up until that point, for all 12 years I had been doing research it was nothing but printed posters; from “modular” poster board-backed panels hung by thumb tacks, to the large single sheet print-outs. I’ve used Photoshop and PowerPoint and/or a combination of both. I can’t wait until digital display screens get inexpensive enough to furnish every presenter with a monitor for showing digital posters with interactive animations. That could definitely end up in catastrophe, encouraging common PowerPoint offenses, but the best digital posters would help to set a good standard.

Q: How important is the aesthetic, the artistic quality, of a scientific poster?

A: Art can do many things: please, provoke, challenge, and communicate to name a few. The most appropriate use for art in science posters is to communicate efficiently. When the symbols are consistent, the colors “logical” (e.g., complimentary colors showing opposing components of a system), the layout uncluttered with a logical flow, etc., the viewer is satisfied both intellectually and emotionally. I think science posters should strive to become technically beautiful (I also love the beauty in less rigid things, but that’s a different category).

Q: What advice do you have for scientists to make their posters more beautiful?

A: Pick a standard visual language and stick with it (e.g., what shapes to use for proteins, cells, test subjects, etc.); don’t be afraid of abstraction; use complementary contrasting colors, not clashing colors (there’s a difference); look to commercial biotech posters for inspiration; if you have microscopy, show it off!

Thanks for the opportunity to share my poster-painting experience with your readers.

Thanks, Karmella, for taking the time to answer some questions!

Related posts

True artwork: the painted poster

External links

Karmella Haynes at Arizona State University
KarmellaHaynes.com
Karmella Haynes on Google+

Tree of Life blog:

Link roundup, September 2011

2011-09-15T07:00:00.001-05:00

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.

Past the low point?

2011-09-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

When I recently attended the Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting, I noted that there were a lot fewer train wrecks than I’d seen at previous meetings.

At first, I was puzzled by this. Of the 23 people I had the chance to ask how they put their poster together, fourteen worked in PowerPoint (61%), two in Illustrator, one in Pages, and one in InDesign. PowerPoint was still ruling the roost, as it did when I surveyed readers about a year ago.

I think what has happened in the year since I took the poll was that many more people are using PowerPoint 2010. One of the signs that many more people are using the latest version of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office is that I saw a lot of talks and posters using Calibri, which I hadn’t noticed before.

The new version of PowerPoint has one critical feature that helps a lot: smart guides.

PowerPoint got much better at lining things up in the 2010 version compared to the 2007 edition. (This is in stark contrast to Publisher, whose snap function got noticeably worse in the 2010 version.)

Previously, the lack of alignment was almost a dead giveaway that a poster was composed in PowerPoint. But it’s getting harder to tell. This makes me hopeful that the number of appalling conference posters will be lower at all conferences, not just the ESA meeting.

Posters with Spice

2011-09-07T09:58:00.001-05:00

Via Daniel McArthur on Twitter. Inspired by Chris Gunter on Twitter.

Critique: Plant real estate

2011-09-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

This week, I have another favourite poster from the Ecological Society of America meeting. This poster is by Sara Kuebbing, who made it in PowerPoint. As always, click to enlarge.

The title is big, which made it easy for me to read at a glance while I was walking down the wide hallways of the poster exhibit in the Austin convention center.

Similarly, the plant pictures on the left make for a nice entry point.

The reading flow on the poster is very good. There is never any question of where to look next.

I like the complementary shades of green, which is always an obvious choice when showcasing plants. Alternating the colours in the title also added some visual interest. I was a little concerned that the green at the very top of the poster might have been a shade too dark if the lighting wasn’t as good as it was, but this poster was located in decent light.

With all the green, there may have been a bit of a missed opportunity to use an opposing colour. I might have used tom red for the key data points in the graphs pop. In the marked up version below, notice how the red of the comment boxes I added pops against the green.

The poster would benefit from a stronger sense of hierarchy in the test (discussed by Marcia Hoang last week). The headings, while well marked out by the green bars, look weak. The size of the headings is too small, and the regular poster text below the headings often looks more powerful than the headings, especially when bolded.

Clearly, Sara paid attention to the vertical alignment of each column. The overall effect would be strengthened if the column widths was more consistent. I would have suggested making every column either the same width, or a multiple of the width, of the column with the introduction.

Thanks to Sara for being generous enough to share this with me!

External links

Abstract to the poster

Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour #110

2011-08-29T07:00:00.001-05:00

Last week, I had a lovely live chat with Dr. Kirsten Sanford, a.k.a. Dr. Kiki, on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour! Episode 110 was titled, “Invasion of the Marmorkrebs!” and is mostly about unusual crayfish I’ve been studying.

Near the end, though, we talk a little bit about this blog. Fast forward to the 44:00 minute mark.

Kiki asks what my top three poster tips would be. You can hear my live response in the video. Having thought about it, I would like to modify those top three to these.

Write less, show more.
Make it bigger.
Line it up.

A stunning, sleek, cool... syllabus?

2011-08-26T13:19:00.001-05:00

Today, Twitter is a-buzzin’ with people retweetin’.

Stunning!

Sleek!

Coolest EVER!

Ans it’s a university class syllabus.

A syllabus is generating these comments? This is a first. Elsewhere, I’ve noted:

Things you rarely read on RateMyProfessors.com:

“This professor had a great syllabus.”

History professor Tona Hangen has accomplished what I thought was impossible. She describes on her post, Extreme Makeover, Syllbus Edition, why she turned this (which I think is fair to say is not too far off the mark from a lot of conference posters):

Into this:

And the moral of the story is: Beauty matters. Design matters. With them, you can take something that people overlook and make it fresh and appealing. It can invite people to stop and explore. You can make the mundane and forgettable into something that people will share and talk about.

External links

Extreme makeover, Syllabus Edition
Creative approaches to the syllabus

Critique: Geese and swans

2011-08-25T07:00:00.005-05:00

At the recent Ecological Society of America meeting (covered here and here), this was one of the posters that “popped” out at me. Click to enlarge:

This poster interests me greatly, because there are many things that I would normally pick at on other posters, but don’t bother me here. For instance, I normally tell people to limit themselves to two colours; there’s at least four on display here. But it works.

When speaking to the presenter, Dan Brooks, about it, I discovered something unusual: he had not made it. It was made by Marcia Hoang, a professional graphic artist who works with the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Marcia graciously agreed to answer some questions for me about this poster and design.

Q: Because you’re a designer, not a scientist, have you ever been to a scientific conference before and seen the posters?

A: I have never been to a scientific conference before, but I do work at the Houston Museum of Natural Science as a graphic designer for exhibits. I think that helped me a lot when designing this poster, knowing what points to emphasize and what points were less important for viewers to see at first glance.

Q: Could you describe the process of working with the researcher, Dan Brooks, on this? How much of the text and graphs does he give you, and how much do you create?

A: Dan Brooks was great, because he had all the information he wanted on the poster ready to go, as well as a resource of images and graphs. Although Dan provided me with graphs and pie charts, I wanted to redesign them so that they were more easily read and had the same look and colour scheme as the rest of the poster.

Q: What software did you use to put the poster together?

A: I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Q: One of the things that is very striking about this poster is the use of colour. I often advise people to stay away from many colours on posters, because it seems easy to do more harm than good! Was there any sort of plan behind the choice and use of colours?

A: I think colour is very important to a poster if used correctly. I chose colours that came from the goose to inspire the rest of the poster. I then used these colours to separate sections of information from each other.

Q: I see on your website that you’ve done other science-based graphics, like “Biggest stars” and “Skull wall.” Is designing a scientific graphic any different than other projects?

A: Yes, both of the projects you named were for the Houston Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land. Designing a scientific graphic, especially for education, has many restrictions. Often times, the type must be quite large for audiences of all ages to read it, and color schemes have already been set by the subject of the graphic, i.e., the stars in outer space already glow with certain colors. While certain design liberties are not accessible, it is part of a designers job to push these boundaries, to be creative, to be able to catch the viewer's eye.

Q: Do you have any advice to help a scientist making a poster? Putting it another way, what are the pitfalls that people not trained in design fall into over and over again?

A: I often see lack of hierarchy in text. Hierarchy is very important so that viewers may scan a large poster with an abundant amount of information and be able to know the general points it covers.

Another mistake many people make is putting photographs that are pixelated or are not well photographed onto their displays. We are very visual, so beautiful images tend to be the first thing to draw the eye.

Q: Straight graphic design geekery now: Do you have a favourite typeface?

A: I usually lean towards thinner typefaces. I am a big fan of Archer. And to add to the previous question: please stay away from Comic Sans, Papyrus, Courier, and the likes. Stick to something easy to read and you will be all right.

Thanks to Dan Brooks and Marcia Hoang for generously sharing this with me!

Related posts

Two rules of two

Take me home tonight

2011-08-18T07:00:00.002-05:00

What is the one thing you want people to remember a day after they’ve walked away from your poster?

Don’t have an answer?

I don’t do it regularly enough myself. I thought about my last talk, and I didn’t ask that question before hand. In retrospect, it was probably one of the reasons I thought I could have done better on the talk.

If you don’t know the answer to this question, how do you think someone unfamiliar with your work is going to remember anything about it?

You do have an answer? That’s great! But do you have anything on your poster that says it?

Why not make a section on your poster and label it, “Take home message”?

Many posters, because they are so heavily influenced by the standard scientific IMRAD manuscript format, end with a Discussion section. Discussion sections can include a lot of different things, including why this study advances our knowledge, limitations of the study, suggestions for future directions, and much more.

Too. Much. Stuff.

Why not replace the Discussion section entirely with a Take Home Message?

If you do include a take home message, remember that it is one take home message and not many take home messages. I saw a poster recently that has three paragraphs worth of take home message, which defeats the purpose of telling the viewer what you consider important.

Don’t make your viewer guess what they should remember. Tell them outright.

Related posts

Breaking the hourglass for headings that holler

Photo by lordog on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The view from Austin, part 2: Ecological Society of America meeting, 2011

2011-08-15T07:00:00.002-05:00

One thing I rather like about the Ecological Society of America meeting in theory was that it had a “late breaking” poster session. These are posters whose abstracts were submitted late, after the deadline for oral presentations.

A lot of people took advantage of this opportunity. The program book listed 201 poster titles for the late breaking poster session, whereas none of the regular poster sessions the previous four days cracked 200.

But people presenting posters that Friday morning kind of got screwed.

First, the conference lasts only a half day on Friday. Thanks to things like hotel check-out times and plane flights, a lot of people had already left. Sad, but perhaps unavoidable.

What might have been avoidable was that unlike the regular poster sessions Monday through Friday, which had about an hour and a half where there were no regular PowerPoint talks, there were a full slate of talks going on simultaneously with the late breaking poster session.

I know that the people who submitted the posters did so late, and should be thankful for the chance to present at all, but it seems needlessly cruel to put that poster session against competition from talks. It was disheartening to walk into the conference center to see those last few posters.

In my previous post from ESA, I bemoaned that many posters were too small for their space. One culprit behind this was recycling posters from a previous meeting. Another was the cost involved in making larger posters.

And continuing on from last time...

The Comic Sans name and shame campaign!

Liu and colleagues had Comic Sans on their poster, “Host-specific pathogens shape abundances of phylogenetically related tree species.” Luckily, it was only in the title.

In contrast, De Steven and Gramling set everything on their poster, “Diverse wetland restoration approaches under working-lands programs in the Southeastern U.S.: implications for ecosystem services” in Comic Sans.

There may have been less of the dreaded typeface at ESA than at other conferences. Maybe there will be none in Portland?

Related posts

The view from Austin: Ecological Society of America meeting, 2011

The view from Austin: Ecological Society of America meeting, 2011

2011-08-11T07:00:00.005-05:00

I have been attending the Ecological Society of America meeting this week. I’ve seen three days of posters, and have two to go. I may have some more to say next week, but with over 500 posters passing by my eyeballs so far, I have a few impressions about the state of conference posters at this meeting.

I was pleasantly surprised by what I’ve seen at this meeting. Normally, I see a substantial number of train wrecks in the poster sessions, but there have been very few at this meeting. Only one made me shudder. It was perhaps two feet wide and one foot tall, and written in tiny type.

While that poster was so small to be a problem, I noticed was that many of the posters could have been much larger. The poster boards at this meeting were standard cloth covered boards 4 feet high and 8 feet wide. Many posters were perhaps four or five feet wide.

I was often looking at posters thinking, “Make it bigger.” The posters looked timid.

At this meeting in particular, I was browsing much more than usual, because this is not a research field that I have followed closely. I was very aware that I was only giving each poster a few seconds to convince me to stop and look closer. It’s easy to breeze past a small poster because deciphering the subject matter is just that much trickier.

It is true that many people do not have the luxury of having their own printer, and bigger posters can run up a bigger print bill. But be aware that if you cut the cost of printing, you will pay the cost in audience attention.

Few people used the extra space to put up handouts with small versions of the posters. Much less common than other meetings I've been to.

And now, because I warned people on Twitter that I would do this...

The Comic Sans name and shame campaign!

Armstrong and Cooley, who used Comic Sans in the title of their poster, “Preparing diverse students in our Nations’ west to lead sustainable communities”. And you’re from the ESA! Set an example to others, guys!

YV Garcia from the University of Northern Colorado, who also used the dread typeface in the title of her poster, “Sci*Five: A promising model to enhance ecology research in an elementary school classroom.

On Tuesday, two posters from Auburn University took it to the next level and did their entire poster in Comic Sans. JS Kush and colleagues with “Miscommunication and confusion about longleaf pine growth” and Hermann and colleagues, “Effects of 25 years of different fire regimes on growth of young longleaf pine trees and encroaching hardwoods.”

Having no Comic Sans on 99% is a good average, and maybe a little more selection pressure can help make the font extinct at this meeting.

Link roundup, August 2011

2011-08-04T07:00:00.003-05:00

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen various article that weren’t quite enough to trigger off my own post, so a linkfest is in order!

Layout

Jim Campbell discusses a comic page layout that doesn’t work.

Less relevant to posters, but also worth checking out, is the problems emerging from forgetting that people read left to right.

Typography

There are certain epic battles that just never end. Kirk versus Picard. Coke vs. Pepsi. Serif versus sans serif typefaces. This lengthy post, however, has more research ammunition to back it up than you usually find in this debate. I like this assessment of the problem near the end:

What initially seemed a neat dichotomous question of serif versus sans serif has resulted in a body of research consisting of weak claims and counter-claims, and study after study with findings of “no difference”.

Graphs

For those looking for new ways to present numeric data, check out the
slopeograph.

Conferences

The new president of the Animal Behavior Society describes how to judge a poster competition. I am interested that she thinks the content should be the only thing posters should be judged for:

What should the criteria of excellence be? I think there is only one: the best, most creative, innovative science.

QR codes

At Museum 2.0, Nina Simon talks about how she used QR codes in museum displays. Many of the issues she describes are exactly those faced by people who want to enhance their posters. Her tip? Don’t just put the code: tell people what they’ll get!

The uphill battle for QR codes

2011-07-28T07:00:00.004-05:00

QR codes offer the potential to enhance a poster in all sorts of cool ways. But there are issues to think about before you use them.

Audience side

Why do I care what’s on the other side? What is the carrot for someone to take the picture with their smartphone and download? Most of the carrots I’ve seen offered by QR codes are on par with those “3 secrets of a flat stomach” ads that litter websites.
QR codes are not self-explanatory. You have to explicitly explain to someone what it is and how to do it the first time. When people first got email long ago, they included explicit instructions about how to format the addresses. It took a few years for understanding of email to become common knowledge. QR codes are at that very early stage of people’s understanding of what they are.
You need a smartphone. Heck, I don’t have one.
You have to have a specific app on your smartphone.

Presenter side

QR codes require planning. You have to have something to link to. Given that many people do things at the last minute, making a QR code falls off the list.
Most QR codes are links to the Internet, so what is that the advantage over a text URL? It can be quicker, I suppose, if the URL is long – but even that can be fixed using bit.ly or some other URL shortening service.

Still, even if you are clever enough to come up with something cool to do with a QR code, there are these little barriers that you have to get through on the audience side to make it work.

For those who argue that the biggest problem with QR codes is that they are ugly, I urge you to check out this gallery of QR codes, which take advantage of just how tolerant QR codes are to distortion. You can make some quite beautiful things with QR codes. (One shown at right.)

Don’t put anything critical for understanding of your poster on a QR code just yet.

Indeed, after I wrote the bulk of this article, a commenter in a previous post brought up that some companies, notably Google, are moving towards near-field communication (NFC) instead of QR codes for some purposes. As NFC relies on a chip, though, it is difficult to see them replacing QR codes in every situation.

Related posts

Smart posters
Too futuristic? Or already too passe?

Critique: Scaffolder

2011-07-21T07:00:00.021-05:00

Michael Barton is the person behind this lovely poster, featured on his blog Bioinformatics Zen (no relation). Click to enlarge, as usual.

He has a blog post here describing what he was trying to do with the poster, and how he made it. The full post is good reading.

This poster has a strong sense of design and excellent use of colour. It’s a great example of breaking away from the traditional poster format (journal paper in a can), and cutting down the text to lower the intimidation factor.

The contrast between left and right sides of the poster is effective.

The left side of the poster is about the problems of current methods. This gets reflected visually with the grungy background and chunky type.
The right side of the poster offers clarity of the software. This is conveyed visually with ample white space, strong geometric figures, attractive colours, and the subtle sunburst background.

There may be room for some slight improvements.

On the right, some of the text is angled, some horizontal. I might have gone for all angled or all horizontal, as the feeling of “problems” is already very strong.

On the left, the text throughout may be slightly too fine to read easily. On my computer screen, the text boxes were difficult to read. A printer has higher resolution, though, so this might pass the “arm’s length” test, but perhaps just barely.

I am undecided about the circles to the right of the title. They add a nice graphic touch, and they tie in with the larger scaffold circle on the right. But they are crowding the title, and perhaps drawing too much attention to themselves.

Finally, the email down in the corner feels awkward. It’s out of alignment with everything, and it’s not where people will look for contact information. The alignment of the email got to me, so I fired up the graphics editor and played around with the poster a bit more.

In this revision, I tried to enhance the already strong geometric feel of the right hand side of the poster by aligning the text and boxes with each other. Now, every element lines up with at least one other element of the poster. If I was working from the original Inkscape file, I might have moved the last couple of circles on the left, and made other minor experiments.

But these are mere tweaks, idle alterations to a great piece of graphic design. Well done.

A big thanks to Michael for letting me feature this wonderful poster, and his reader, Guy Leonard, for suggesting it!

Related posts

The importance of alignment
Is it big enough? The “arm’s length” test

True artwork: the painted poster

2011-07-14T07:00:00.001-05:00

It is incredibly rare to find a conference poster that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Believe me, I’ve been looking since I started this blog.

This is the first true show-stopper I’ve been able to feature; this is true artwork.

The artist is Karmella Haynes. Jonathan Eisen highlighted this gorgeous piece of poster in two posts here and here.

Typography for Lawyers: Sustained

2011-07-07T07:00:00.035-05:00

The website Typography for Lawyers is a good resource. Author Matthew Butterick has experience as a typographer, and presents his craft very well.

I particularly like this quote, since it applies so emphatically to poster sessions:

I believe that most readers are looking for reasons to stop reading. Not because they’re malicious or aloof. They’re just being rational. If readers have other demands on their time, why should they pay any more attenion than they absolutely must? Readers are always looking for the exit.

Most of the website deals with smaller details needed for multi-page documents, rather than more complex layout of multiple parts on a single that is the problem for most poster makers. But there is good advice on how wide columns should be (two to three alphabets should fit in a single line), and tips on page layout, including this gem:

Don’t try to resolve typographic decisions with logic.

The book is significantly longer than the website, but the website is helpful.

Clean solutions to a visual mess

2011-06-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

Clean Up Your Mess is a short, very helpful website about visual design by Daniel Higgenbotham. It talks about things close to my heart at this blog, like alignment, boxism, and hierarchies.

Photo by Wonderdawg777 on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Printing posters

2011-06-23T07:00:00.005-05:00

One reason that people like giving a talk more than a poster is that talk doesn’t have to be printed. While almost everyone has the computing power to make and display a PowerPoint talk, few have what they need to print a full-sized conference poster. Your options:

Own a large format plotter printer.

It’s not within reach of the typical conference goer to own their own personal big printer. This price list starts at $1,400 and ends at, “More than $4,700.” I’m too scared to see how much more.

Such a printer is not out of reach as a piece of shared equipment, though. Our department shares a plotter printer with another departments. The ink, paper, and so forth is paid for by various student fees and department budget. Students and faculty alike use it.

Our university library has a second plotter poster, which is smaller than our departmental printer. They also have a policy limiting people to one free poster, of a certain size (48 inches, I think) per semester.

If you are in an institution that does not have one, try to convince people that this is a useful resource.

Hire someone to print your poster.

Your first option is to go local. Check your local business directory and look either for “graphics” or “signs.”

Your second option is to use an online printing company. There are several that specialize in doing conference posters. Most are able to send you your poster by overnight courier the day after you submit it.

I’ve talked about some of the services offered by PosterSession. Their blog has inspired some posts of my own.

I’ve also recently learned about MakeSigns. Their website has a lot of resources, especially if you’re one of the many who still insist on using PowerPoint for posters. (I say again: There are better options!) In particular, they have a lot of PowerPoint templates at many different sizes.

Minor quibble: Their page on web graphics cautions against low resolution, which I have also done. But it doesn’t make it clear that an online graphic may be fine on a poster, regardless of the low dots per inch (DPI). The number of dots (pixels) of the picture when printed is what matters, not the screen resolution.

Example: An online picture that is 1,920 pixels wide at 96 DPI is 20 inches on screen. If you print that 5 inches wide on a poster, the resolution is 384 DPI, far more than you need. If you wanted to use that picture as a massive background 48 inches wide, however, you have 40 DPI and it would look terrible.

Print the poster in letter paper sized pieces.

This is favoured by people who just want to re-use their PowerPoint slides as posters. Print off each slide, glue them to some coloured paper, and there’s your poster.

These generally look quite poor. It is very difficult to get all the pieces glued down onto decent heavy paper, then tack up all the individual pieces so they are neatly aligned. Plus, most inkjet printers and standard letter paper don’t have the crispness of printing or the bright colours that you can get from a high end plotter printer.

Not recommended.

The edge effect

2011-06-16T07:00:00.003-05:00

At a conference last week, I had two posters next to each other. The next day, I scribbled this in my notes:

I think the difference in traffic was not due to any inherent difference in the poster, either scientifically or graphically, but was because of the room layout.

All the posters in the session were mounted on single poster boards. Every single mounting board had one had one edge along a wall (or, in the center, a curtained room divider). This meant that poster viewers couldn’t walk along a row of posters. They had to walk in towards the wall, surrounded by posters on either side, over and over again.

Remember that people read from left to right, so the starting point of a poster is on the left edge.

The poster marked “more traffic” above has its left edge away from the wall. As soon as people walked into that cul-de-sac, they first thing they will tend to read will be the “more traffic” poster.

The poster on the right (marked “less traffic”) has its left edge next to the wall. To get to the start of this poster, people have to make their way all to the end of the cul-de-sac. The path might be blocked with people reading the other poster, or people reading the end of the poster they want to start reading.

One poster had an unfair advantage in attracting attention over the other.

And the moral of the story is: Conference organizers, think about the patterns of foot traffic in the poster session! They influence what posters get viewed the most.

Critique: Motor units

2011-06-09T07:00:00.014-05:00

Today’s poster comes from Mike Pascoe, and is used with his permission. Click to enlarge:

There is a lot to love about this poster.

Uncluttered. The text is pared down and the graphs are given ample margins to let white space. It is not an intimidating poster. It invites in people, saying, “Hey, I am going to tell you my story and be done in two minutes. It won’t take you half an hour to decipher me.”
Aligned. The columns are clean (though not perfect).
There is no confusion about where I should read next, even when the poster switches to the reading order going sideways (Results section 4 to 5) instead of down (the rest of the poster).
The artwork of the arms in Results section 1 acts as a nice entry point for passers-by.
It has a QR code, which is at the vanguard of today’s conference poster technology (which I say purely and only because I wrote a blog post about them). Just so you don’t have to scan the image above, it links here. This is a full package of everything someone at a poster session might want to follow-up on.

This poster succeeds brilliantly on those points alone. Do not be fooled that the list I am about to give of potential improvements is longer than the list above makes this a bad poster. It does not. The points above weigh heavily. The points below are trivial.

If I were to pick on a few points where maybe things could be improved...

The combination of Times New Roman and Arial is readable, but lacks character. A little something more daring, perhaps for the headings, would make this a little less “plain white bread.”
Arial is used throughout the results, for both sub-headings and graph labels. Those are more text-level than heading level, and putting those in Time New Roman might have been a better match. The poster is perfectly consistent, which is good, but I am not sure if it meets expectations about hierarchy.
The colours of results sections 2 and 3 could be made more consistent.
Similarly, the graphs in results sections 4 and 5 use symbols filled with colour, and the graphs in results section 6 don’t.
Containing only text, that all important left hand column is just a trifle gray.
I remain unconvinced that poster numbers (in the upper right under the QR code) are helpful to viewers.
The first section of Results, um, isn’t results. “Experimental setup” should be in methods.
The two “Experimental setup” pictures are further to the left than the corresponding pictures below them.
The Results section heading could be made even more descriptive. For instance, instead of, “Sustained contraction characteristics,” it could be worth the extra bit of space to say, “Sustained contraction characteristics differ in young and old.”
And now we’re down to truly nitpicky stuff... But I am not alone in disliking a comma before an ampersand symbol (in the list of author’s names).

This is a great looking poster, and I bet it went down well.

Breaking the hourglass for headings that holler

2011-06-02T07:00:00.002-05:00

Making a poster like a journal article is one of the easiest traps for a poster maker to fall into.

Much of the good advice about posters from Mike the Mad Biologist will be familiar to readers. But this one is something I haven’t written about:

Informative headings are your friends. I see too many posters with sections labelled “Abstract”, “Methods”, “Results”, and “Conclusions.” You have a summary! And some methods! Results and conclusions too! Bully for you. Use the section headings to inform the reader, while simultaneously describing the figure or table (see #2). Something like, “xyz genes are found only in clinical isolates” tells me what I should be looking for in the figure.

This is a classic case of doing something for no reason other than habit.

Academics write journal articles. It’s what we do. And journal articles have a very rigid structure that takes practice to master. So much so that it becomes second nature.

The classic journal structure has an acronym: IMRAD. The letters stand for the section headings that Mike refers to: Introduction, Methods, Results, And Discussion. This format leads to people saying that academic papers have an hourglass shape: They start off very broad in terms of problems and concepts (Introduction), increasingly become more specific and detailed (Methods and Results), then widen back out again to big picture stuff (Discussion).

You can even see this tapering from general to specific in the Introduction. The first sentence is usually about some very big issue, like terrorism or invasive species or the nature of sexism. Then it pares down to to a more specific question, then pares down again and again until you get to this particular paper.

This means that the specific research question is usually buried in the last paragraph of the Introduction. this could be two to five paragraphs down in the text. This is what my journalist friends call, “burying the lead.”

But you don’t need to follow that structure on a poster! At least, not to the degree of actually spelling out each heading.

Someone looking through conference posters wants to know the question you are trying to answer immediately. Putting those key points in big text as a heading helps the curious quickly figure out if this is something they want to read. The IMRAD format is so well known to academics that you can dispense with them entirely. I did that on one of the favourite posters that I’ve done, and it worked well, in my opinion.

Instead of, “Introduction blah blah blah research question?”, shorten it to, “Research question.” Leave all the rationale and justification and background and blah blah blah off the poster and say it to people who visit your poster.

Related posts

Poster Venn
Should your first presentation be a poster?
References on posters

Trap photo by kevindean on Flickr; hourglass photo by bogenfreund on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.

Posters as whiteboards

2011-05-26T07:00:00.001-05:00

The Poster Session blog (commercial site) notes that you can write on some laminated posters with dry erase markers.

This opens up interesting possibilities. You can leave space on your poster where you can write in discussions. You could leave diagrams unfinished, then draw on the poster to show relationships as you’re giving the poster.

Poster versus talk, May 2011 edition

2011-05-19T07:00:00.017-05:00

Eva Amsen at the Expression Patterns blog asked if people preferred giving talks or posters. The winner, by about a three to one margin, was a talk. This is about the ratio that I saw the last time this came up.

I have not seen a discussion of which format people prefer as an audience member, though. I think a poll may be in order... check the right hand side of the blog.

Related posts

Poster or talk?
Should your first presentation be a poster?
Poster versus talk, May 2010 edition

Poster conversations matter

2011-05-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

In a longer post about the qualifications for a doctorate, DrugMonkey dropped in this little bit about the importance of posters:

I confess, when trainees are still pre-doc or recently annointed, I don’t get a general impression of them by toting up their (research papers). Yes, it contributes some but really, how could I possibly keep track? The things that contribute in a big way are my direct interactions and experiences at meetings. Poster conversations, their presentation of data from the platform, etc. This is what convinces me that the training program is a stellar one....the trainees appear to be good scientists with a head on their shoulders.

My emphasis.

Critique: Shrimp parasites

2011-05-12T07:00:00.002-05:00

Forgive me for showing one of my own posters again. I thought this was a good follow-up to last week’s post on logos, because one of the things I wanted to do with this poster was to subvert the way most people do titles.

I wanted to turn that prime top left corner into an entry point or highway sign by putting the most immediately recognizable image that was relevant to the research. Strictly speaking, the poster is more about the parasites inside the shrimp than the shrimp itself, but people know what a shrimp is.

Because the background of the picture was solid black, that gave me the idea to make the title space a distinct black banner.

I’d wanted to try an orange and blue colour scheme ever since I’d written a blog post about orange and blue on movie posters. But I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t come by it honestly: the staining technique I used for the first picture in the introduction gave me orange and blue! Two of the other pictures were orange-ish colours, so it made for a surprisingly consistent colour scheme.

I carried the colours through in the section headers, the data points in the graphs, and the title. Those may be too subtle in the last two, though.

Reference

Carreon N, Faulkes Z, Fredensborg BL. Polypocephalus sp. infects the nervous system and increases activity of commercially harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). Journal of Parasitology: In press. DOI: 10.1645/GE-2749.1 (If DOI link is not working, abstract and preprint available here.)

The epic logo post

2011-05-05T07:00:00.071-05:00

Previously, a healthy comment thread developed in about institutional logos on posters. It was something I thought I had discussed before, but only in passing (here, here). It’s long past time to pull my thoughts together on them.

The case against logos

People care as much about your university’s logo on your poster as much as they care about the logos on this:

Which is to say, not at all.

Logos on the car do not interfere with the car’s ability to drive. Unfortunately, logos on a poster can interfere with the poster’s ability to communicate. If people try to put too much stuff on posters (which everyone falls prey to), logos chew up vital space in a situation where every square centimeter counts.

This issue is one that slide presenters face all the time. Here’s what some smart people have to say about logos on PowerPoint presentations.

Garr Reynolds asked, “Who says we need our logo on every slide?” on his Presentation Zen blog:

If you are presenting for an organization try removing logos (and other clutter) from all except the first and last slide. If you want people to learn something and remember you, then make a good, honest presentation. The logo won’t help make a sell or make a point, but the clutter it brings does add unnecessary noise and makes the presentation visuals look like a commercial. And people hate commercials or being sold to.

I’ve added the emphasis. There are some similar sentiments on page 129 of his book Presentation Zen:

Slide real estate is limited as it is, so don’t clutter it with logos and trademarks, footers, and so on.

This is even more true in a poster. You can have an indefinite number of PowerPoint slides, but you have only one piece of paper for a poster.

Nancy Duarte wrote about logos in Slide:ology (page 117, for those following along at home):

Where does it say that every slide needs a logo? The people who have come to hear you speak most likely know who you work for. ...

Two of my pet peeves are people who include their logo on every slide, and that animated paper clip in the Microsoft Office product suite.

Think about that, mes amis. Logo overuse puts you on a par with Clippy in annoying and irritating your audience.

Clippy!

Speaking of Microsoft, they took Colin Purrington’s Advice on Designing Scientific Posters and put it on the official page for Microsoft Office). Colin on logos (my emphasis):

Institutional logos are great on departmental letterhead and college athletic caps, but are really rather obnoxious on posters. This is because your institution's name is already on the poster in the address below the title, and thus the logo adds absolutely nothing except recognizable branding.

Except that, in most cases, the logo doesn’t even add recognizable branding. As Seth Godin noted, the logos of many major companies are interchangeable. If you look at many university logos, the sameness is palpable.

Circles are popular:

Shields, no longer serving any practical purpose in battle, continue to work well in logo design:

Some logos designers are apparently frustrated architects, and like to feature buildings:

Then you have the typography purists, using mainly words – and the occasional horizontal line for that extra classy touch:

I pick these not because they are bad logos; they’re not. I pick these to show that when you’re faced with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of these at a conference, your logo is not as distinctive as you think.

Logos acquire meaning through repeated association. A mermaid has nothing to do with coffee, except at Starbucks. This means that your logo is most likely to be effective at a small regional meeting, where people know your institution. At a big national meeting with thousands of posters (where people are most likely to insist on “promoting their brand,” because they don’t understand the difference between a brand and a logo), it’s most likely pointless.

Some people noted that their institutions have a template for posters that include logos. Institutional templates can be helpful, if they were done by a professional designer. Templates bring benefit of consistency, which can be attractive and bring cohesion if you have multiple posters.

Consider the problems when you have a project with many participating institutions, and each demands their own logo space. The likelihood that the logos will have complementary colours or shapes is almost zero:

The madness has to stop now, or this will be the conference poster of the future:

The actual scientific content will be accessed by a QR code in the bottom, linking to a PDF of the research.

How to use logos

If you want or need to include logos (i.e., your boss makes you), here’s how to do it right.

Here is how I often see logos used. I call them “logo bookends.”

These poor logos are squashed, misaligned, pixelated, and they’re drawing attention to all these faults thanks to the white box around them.

It’s an easy to see how this happens. People center titles because they think centring looks classy. This leaves space on either side, and people think that every blank space has to be filled. They look for a logo, grab the first thing they can find off their university’s web page, and stick them in the corners. The logos are the wrong shape, so people resize them without paying attention to their original proportions.

Understandable, but still sloppy.

Make sure your logos, like all your images, are high resolution. Do not grab images that are only a hundred pixels wide from your institution’s home page and blow them to several inches across. Find out where the publication quality versions are; it will often be something like your institutions public relations or university relations. Institutions and funding agencies often have the high-resolution logos available on their websites in several formats. For instance, the National Science Foundation has several versions of their logo and guidelines for its use. The National Institutes of Health have something similar.

Make sure that circles stay circular. If you’re using PowerPoint, I have a guide that describes how PowerPoint tends to distort images and how to fix them.

If you have a coloured background, take the time to make the logo transparent. This means will often mean converting from JPG to PNG. Better still if you can find a vector-based image.

Alternately, a plain white background is less likely to run you into problems. I’ll use those as examples from here on.

Here’s another variation on the logo bookends. This one is favoured by people who want the logos to take up as much space as possible:

For goodness’ sake, don’t repeat logos. The redundancy (affiliation shown twice with the logos, once with the text) is pointless. Here, the multiple logos forces a one-line title to spread over two lines, taking up valuable space where the results and data could be. Again, the distortion of what is obviously a circle shows carelessness.

Here are a couple of alternatives if someone insists you use the logo. First, you may find a home for the logo at the bottom:

Colin Purrington favours this placement (from Advice on Designing Scientific Posters and Microsoft Office’s PowerPoint page):

But if you are somehow genetically predispositioned to use logos on your poster, make sure that they are small (1” for maximum dimension) and corralled into the Acknowledgement section along with, perhaps, logos of funding organizations. E.g., never, ever put a logo at the top of your poster.

Nancy Duarte is talking about slides here, but the point is similar. On Slide:ology (page 117):

(I)f your boss insists you put the logo on every slide, the lower right is the best place for it because you can wrap the right rag of text around it. After all, the same box who wants the logo on every slide probably has so much text to shoehorn in, you need to wrap it.

This is also true of posters, following the Cosmo Principle: the top left is the most valuable spot, and the bottom right is the least valuable spot. Logos can serve to even out some unused spaces on the bottom of posters. I did this on one of my own favourite posters. It’s one thing that the poster pictured at right did correctly.

Another option is to break away from centering your title. By using standard left alignment, you can often create enough white space where the logo can live unobtrusively:

Many logos come in alternate colours and shapes. For instance, my university’s logo comes in full colour, a version using either of the logo’s two primary colours, and black and white. And there are both vertical and horizontal versions, too. Here, for instance, is a poster made with the demo version of PosterGenius (reviewed here; the data was published in Nasir and Faulkes 2011):

This poster has the advantage of a short title, which means there is lots of space between the text and the logo in the upper right. The logo is a complementary colour to the rest of the poster background. It’s there, but it doesn’t fight with the rest of the poster. Now see what would have happened if I had used a different institutional logo:

Now the logo is competing for attention with the rest of the poster, largely because the greens are contrasting with the more neutral background. (I should say that I replaced the logo with a graphics editor. It probably wouldn’t be as large if I’d put it in with PosterGenius.)

As someone who likes graphics, I love logos and appreciate the skill that goes into making them. But I have seen them used so badly, so often on posters that for most people, this is the best option for logos:

None at all.

Related posts

Poster real estate
Learning from Cosmo

External links

Presentation Zen: Who says we need our logo on every slide?
Seth’s Blog: But you’re not saying anything, Logos, Your brand is not your logo

References

Nasir U, Faulkes Z. 2011. Color polymorphism of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Journal of Crustacean Biology 31(2): 240-245. DOI: 10.1651/10-3356.1

Credits

NASCAR car photo by by Darryl W. Moran Photography on Flickr; logo party photo by tantek on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.

IGERT poster competition

2011-05-03T09:31:00.000-05:00

The National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program – better known as the IGERT program – is hosting a poster competition. 135 entries are available for viewing right now.

The format for the competition is interesting. They have a downloadable poster, with recorded audio “tours” by the “presenter.” This offers a chance to hear how self-contained each poster is. Is the commentary adding anything valuable?

With 135 to look at, the experience of browsing the website is very much like being at a conference. Try to avoid the temptation to filter down to your particular discipline. As you look at through the thumbnails, ask yourself:

“Which am I clicking on, and why?”

Twenty-four finalists are supposed to be announced this Friday, 6 May.

P.S.—If anyone has a suggestion for posters they’d like me to critique, I’m all ears!

^* Hopefully they will be more prompt than the AACR poster competition, for which the winner still hasn’t been announced as far as I can see.

Critique: Ovarian cancer cells

2011-04-28T07:00:00.010-05:00

The third and final entry in the American Association for Cancer Research poster competition. This one is from the Stanford University School of Medicine... (Click to enlarge.)

Virtues:

Definite and distinct columns. Although the columns are unequal, at least they are almost always a consistent width from top to bottom.
The red section headers are effective at breaking up the gray text.
The colours are mostly consistent, tying in with some of the cell pictures on the right.
At least there’s only one logo next to the title.

Vices:

Too text heavy, especially in the all important upper left corner, and the top half of the poster.
Having the text crawling up into the title bar.
The methods are in a strange place, no doubt a compromise emerging from poor planning.
The blues and green in the central graph are so different from the rest of the colours, they stick out like a sore thumb.

Based on purely graphics considerations, this one is my favourite of the three. It has the cleanest layout overall, and appears to have had the most thought put into the design. This one has my vote.

Thanks again to Angela Alexander (@flutesUD on Twitter) for handing me three blog posts on a silver platter! See the other two finalists in this competition here and here.

Critique: Breast cancer inhibition

2011-04-27T07:00:00.029-05:00

Today, I’m continuing my critiques of finalists in the American Association for Cancer Research poster competition.

Virtues:

Solid three column layout with most things correctly aligned.

Vices:

Gray.
Unrelenting gray.
Unrelenting gray in the first play a person looks, the upper left corner.
Although I dislike title bookends, at least these are large and graphic - almost a welcome reprieve from the rest of the poster.
An abstract? Something so short does not need a summary.
Lines dividing text instead of white space - a sure sign of desperation arising from trying to put too much in.

Graphically, this is a more disciplined than yesterday’s poster, but it would benefit greatly from being more concise in the text.

Incidentally, you can vote online for these posters. Come back tomorrow for the last finalist in the competition!

Critique: HSV-2 oncolytic virus ΔPK

2011-04-26T09:10:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Angela Alexander on Twitter, I have three posters to critique from the AACR poster competition. I’ll be critiquing all three in separate posts, purely on their graphic design, before the contest winner is announced on 29 April.

Let’s start off with an entry from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, “The HSV-2 oncolytic virus ΔPK induces multiple death and inflammatory programs associated with inhibition of melanoma tumor growth.”

Virtues:

More than half the poster space is taken up with graphics.

Vices:

Institutional logo bookends.
The authors’ credits cutting into the results.
The varying column widths, particularly in the top left, where it’s not clear at first if you’re supposed to read across or down.
Most headers in blue... except for the ones in bright green.
Boxes.
The sudden transition from white to blue background in the last box.
Tiny credits sitting outside boxes, messing up bottom alignment.

This poster is average at best. Will the next one fare any better? Come back tomorrow for another critique!

Too futuristic? Or already too passé?

2011-04-21T07:00:00.005-05:00

One of my most popular posts was a recent one about adding a bit of augmented reality to conference posters using QR codes.

Kristina Kilgrove, a.k.a. Bone Girl, who had written about QR codes almost simultaneously with my post, had a chance to put the idea to the test at a recent meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists:

poster’s been up for 3 hours and NO ONE has scanned the QR code (according to analytics). Wow.

By the end of the day, things had improved... but only very slightly.

have a total of *3* hits through my QR code. Didn’t expect that low a #.

That said, a couple of others had also taken up the notion of trying to enhance their posters through QR codes:

Saw QR codes on posters by @johnhawks and @DrYapyapi today! Way to represent... too bad the physanths aren't prepared for the 21st century.

I’m kind of hoping that it is just a new idea, and not the sort of quickly learned fatigue that Laura Bergalls noted:

The landing pages for most QR codes make you feel like you've been rickrolled. ... Marketers & advertisers have taught us not to scan QR codes. That ship has sailed.

If you try QR codes on your poster, I would love to know what kind of response you get!

Related posts

Smart posters

Picture from here.

“You cannot not communicate”

2011-04-19T13:13:00.001-05:00

The quote in the title is used in this interesting editorial by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg.

Viegas and Wattenberg propose that successful data displays often make it easy for people to find their own demographic (“You are here”), and let people talk about them (the social object theory).

As for the quote in the title itself, it is from type designer Erik Spiekermann.

(B)y the time the first data point hits the screen, you're communicating. The catch: it’s a fallacy to think communication happens solely through the data you're plotting. Even before viewers understand the data, they form strong impressions of the intended message based on colors, fonts, and the like.

Because visualizations are, well... visual, their design is a crucial part of what they communicate. This means that when you try your hardest to build a “neutral” visualization, with subdued tones and discreet type, you are in fact creating a specific mood: “This is serious, serious business.”

Almost paradoxically, this means that you can communicate that a graph is not worth examinining before anyone gets to the data, which would be a shame.

The clearest, most precise graphic in the world communicates nothing if nobody looks at it.

And that’s as true for conference posters as for graphs and data visualization.

Related posts

Conversation piece

Photo by Roo Reynolds on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Is it risky to have a nice poster?

2011-04-14T14:08:00.000-05:00

The Pulsatance blog seems to show a stereotype about conference presentations is still very much alive.

It’s as risky as giving a research presentation where you actually pay attention to font selection, color schemes, and composition.

I can’t quite tell if the author is being serious or sarcastic. I hope it’s meant in jest. I have never heard of someone criticizing, or being criticized, for having a had a poster or presentation that was “too pretty.” (If you have heard such criticisms, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!)

Beautiful does not mean dumb. It’s as true for posters as it is for people.

Related links

Don’t hate beauty

What kind of party?

2011-04-14T07:00:00.007-05:00

If you saw this on an invitation:

What kind of party would it be?

What kind of people would be there? Adults or all ages?

What kind of food would be served? Beer or wine? Or no alcohol at all?

Formal or casual?

I found this quick test for determining the character of a typeface in this panel discussion. The focus is on designing websites, but there is enough general information there that it is worth taking some time to peruse.

Some of the tips contained within are similar to some I’ve talked about here. For instance, “Don’t use too many typefaces” shares a sentiment with my “Rules of Two.” It also talks about the importance of having an extended character set, so critical for scientific posters.

Near the end, it also provides examples of alternatives to familiar typefaces that often fix some of the problems of the older typefaces.

Using grids in PowerPoint

2011-04-07T07:00:00.001-05:00

I can usually recognize a poster that has been made in PowerPoint because nothing lines up. This is part PowerPoint’s fault, but not entirely. If you must use PowerPoint to make your poster (even though you shouldn’t), here’s how to make it look like it was done in a real graphics package.

Click to enlarge any of these images.

First, turn on the grid. Under the View tab, select the “Gridlines” button (just to the left of the magnifying glass).

The default grid size is a strange value: one twelfth of an inch. (Page layout is about the only part of my life where I routinely use Imperial measurements.) You can change the grid size by bringing up the Grid Dialogue box (the little pop-out button is just underneath the button you clicked to get gridlines).

If you drop down the “Spacing,” it will show your options for grid size in fractions rather than decimals.

I usually find it much easier to work with a coarser grid. Grid spacing at one quarter inch makes it easier and faster to align things.

PowerPoint has two “guides” that cross the vertical and horizontal center of the page. Because they cannot be changed, they are useless for most purposes.

As a work around, I draw in my own guidelines for columns and such using the line tool. This takes a bit of calculation, since you have to work out the exact position of each line in advance, and can’t tell PowerPoint you want a three column grid, like you can with Publisher.

After you create your guidelines, you can start dropping in your text and pictures, safe in the knowledge it makes it much easier to get everything with a consistent width.

But after you’ve laid everything out, you have to remember to go back and delete all the guidelines you had for the margins and between the columns.

If you are very careful and consistent, you can make a poster in PowerPoint that looks like it was done in a proper graphics package.

For examples of what you can do with PowerPoint, check out this post at the I was lost but now I live here blog and the featured artwork. Or some of the artwork at PowerPoint Heaven. I particularly like this portrait of Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Carribean films (ZIP file) and this anime girl (ZIP file).

It’s a long, long way from yellow bullet points on a blue background. I think you have to work to hard for these results, but I am nevertheless impressed by the perseverance of the artists!

Related posts

The importance of alignment

Medical posters

2011-04-01T13:39:00.000-05:00

This article in The Scientist has some attractive and interesting vintage posters selling medicine.

Not conference posters, but inspiring nevertheless!

Smart posters

2011-03-31T07:00:00.031-05:00

If you want to create something special on your poster for smart phone users, you want to learn about QR codes. The good news is that they are dead simple and very versatile.

I created a QR code to one of my websites using one of several free QR code generators online. I ended up with something like the graphic at left.

I printed it out, and walked down the hall to one of my colleagues, Chris Vitek, and asked him to take a picture of it with his iPhone. He had never seen one of these before. I repeat: he had no idea of what it was. But he took a picture, used a bar code reader app, and had the phone asking if he wanted to open the link to the website in mere seconds. It was probably faster than if he had tried to type in the website URL.

And the genius thing is the sheer number of different things you can embed in a QR code. A website link. An email address. A YouTube clip. A location in Google Maps. And so on... and so on.

If your poster is for a paper in press, you can put a link to the journal or the PDF.
If you have something that is well documented by video (fairly common in biology!), create and upload the video to YouTube in advance. Much easier than mounting a television on your poster.
You could record a video “tour” of your poster that people could run through if they came by when you weren’t next to your poster.
If you are a grad student or post-doc on the job market, you can put up your email address and contact information so that people can get in touch with you more easily. Presumably, this gets stored into people’s smart phones on the spot, as opposed to business cards that can get lost.

And that is just the beginning. There are many more things you can potentially do with QR codes, including playing around with texting people, using Twitter, Facebook, and much more.

I see two dangers with this.

One is that there are so many things that you could do with a QR code that the temptation would be strong to do all of them. Your poster should not look like some mysterious stamp collection. Pick one, maybe two, things you want to do with a QR code and do them well.

The second danger is to include some critical information that is only available using the QR code. This would violate the general principle that a poster should be self-sufficient as possible. the poster should be like the feature presentation on a DVA. The material made through QR code should be like the DVD bonus materials: pleasant for those who are interested, but not essential to understanding the main show.

The mind boggles at the possibilities. Even I, who do not have a smart phone, can see the potential for using this to make something memorable for those who do.

Credit where it’s due: I was thinking about ways posters, and poster sessions, could take advantage of the ever increasing ubiquity of smart phones when I found that the Poster Session blog beat me to the punch! Curses! I thank them and give them all due credit for giving me the key information that allowed me to write this post.

Additional: Bone Girl had similar ideas!

Related posts

Containment
More power! The poster with a plug

P.S.—If you end up using ideas in this blog, I certainly wouldn’t object if you added the QR code pictured here somewhere in the corner of your poster.

Tubers

2011-03-24T07:00:00.005-05:00

Posters are social objects. Their job is to start conversations. But it’s not just the poster itself that can start conversations.

A while ago, Jennifer Rohn wrote:

When you carry a poster tube at the airport, you find yourself bonding with other tubers, exchanging the acronyms of meeting you’re attending

And this is yet another advantage of giving a poster at a conference rather than a talk. Many people agree that the actual presentations at conferences, scientific or otherwise, are not the most valuable parts of the conference.

When you’re on your way to a bigger conference, carrying that poster tube in the airport increases the chances of striking up one of those conversations that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

But if you’re looking at PowerPoint slides on a laptop in an airport waiting lounge, you send almost no signals to any other conference goers that you, like them, are on your way to do science.

When you see someone with a poster tube in the airport, use that opportunity. Ask them, “Are you going to this conference, too?”

Related post

Conversation piece
From printer to posterboard

Photo by IITA Image Library on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Stay or go?

2011-03-17T12:43:00.002-05:00

The Gripping Cell blog raises a recurring question for poster presenters: Should you stick by your poster as much as possible, or should you see other posters?

When I presented my poster this time, I made the stupid mistake of being present by the poster for only the required duration of 1.5 hrs (every odd numbered poster presenter is required to be present for 1.5 hrs, followed by the even numbered ones for another 1.5 hrs). The reason I bailed out for the other 1.5 hrs was to go see some other posters I was interested in.

What is your strategy for posters sessions?

(Update, 13 April 2011: This post originally had a poll , which has now closed and replaced with the poll results; click to enlarge!)

And, of course, feel free to elaborate in the comments!

Personally, I want the full poster experience. I try to get the poster mounted early, and I try to stand near it almost the entire poster session, and am often one of the last ones out of the hall.

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm, however. Planning is important to get the optimum mix of presentation to viewing time.

Some people scrupulously review poster abstracts in advance, hunting for certain keywords and names. I used to do this a lot, and still do it a bit for big conferences, like Neuroscience.

In general, though, I have developed a much more relaxed planning method for deciding what posters I want to see. For small to medium sized conferences, I walk through the halls outside the scheduled session times, checking out the posters and trying to figure out which ones look interesting, and making mental notes about which ones I should try to get back to later so I ask the presenter questions.

This is something I hope conference organizers are aware of. I hope that they might split topics into two sessions at different times, so that you could see at least half of the posters in your field. It’s a problem for small conferences.

Related posts

Dear conference organizer

Picture by James Cridland on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Critique: Texas crayfish

2011-03-10T07:00:00.024-06:00

This is a poster I made for the 114^th annual meeting of the Texas Academy of Science, which was held last week in Austin, Texas. Though I say it myself, I think it’s one of my best. (As usual, you may click to enlarge.)

I tried yet again to push myself and apply some more of the ideas I’ve talked about here in the blog (oddly, I often write about things before I have a chance to put them into practice).

A compact title; not quite as short as a comic book title, but closer than many.

A big, recognizable picture in the top left as an entry point. This poster also benefited a lot because the whole point of the study was to generate maps. The maps almost act as another entry point, and certainly don’t need a lot of explanation.

The tones in the picture, particularly the clay pots the crayfish is on, helped determine the colour palette for the rest of the poster. It’s carried through the text and the maps. I’m partial to brick red, anyway.

I limited myself to two typefaces; Bernhard Mod for the title and drop caps (which I’d been using as the logo for the Marmorkrebs.org website for some time now), and Gill Sans for the body text. Gill Sans has rapidly become one of my favourite typefaces for posters: it always reads clearly, even some distance away.

One of the more daring ideas I had was to completely get rid of the usual section headings (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion). I did this almost by accident when I started playing around with the “Drop cap” tool in Publisher, and decided that I liked the result. Upon reflection, I reasoned that the drop caps could signal the different sections as well as using actual headings.

I also took a risk in using uneven columns. I tried to use my preferred format, three equally wide columns, and failed. I created a more complex grid of six columns, and ended up with sections of varying width, but I think it worked well. The strong underlying grid gave structure and regularity to something that could have looked chaotic and unplanned.

I also continued experimenting with putting a light texture in the background. It is still very tricky to find one that does not interfere with the legibility of the text, but this one seemed light enough to be fine.

The only two things that are problems are the thumbnail choropleth maps to the upper right of the large map of Texas. Although the high end of the scale works, the yellow on the low end, which takes up much of the map, is too far from the rest of the colours on the poster. And the legends are too small to read. I was hoping they’d be okay on the full size version (48 inches wide by 42 inches high), but they should be bigger.

This poster is about 85% of the way to what I think an excellent conference poster might look like. And all it took was two years of non-stop blogging to warm up to it. I’m very happy with how this one turned out.

Reference

Feria TP, Faulkes Z. Forecasting the distribution of Marmorkrebs, a parthenogenetic crayfish with high invasive potential, in Madagascar, Europe, and North America. Aquatic Invasions 6(1): In press. http://www.aquaticinvasions.net/2011/AI_2011_6_1_Feria_Faulkes_correctedproof.pdf (Preprint)

Big type, small type

2011-03-03T07:00:00.006-06:00

John McWade of Before and After magazine discusses fine-tuning text for large sizes. He even specifically mentions posters!

I haven’t yet found the need to tweak letter spacing as described here. For titles and section headings, it might be worth it. Titles can be very large. Most conferences recommend making your title an inch high (72 points), and I’ve often set them larger (90 or even 120 points).

For the body of the poster, it might not be worth it spending the time fine tuning all the spaces between letters unless you can do it automatically.

Thanks for the tip, John, and allowing me to be a lazy blogger this week.

Speaking of text, I’ll take a second to throw in this link to a post on whether to justify text or not.

Second anniversary

2011-03-01T07:00:00.016-06:00

The second year of this blog has been even better than the first, in many ways. In this last year, the number of visits has about doubled compared to the first. Plus, the second year has seen my most popular post so far (Poster Venn).

Thank you to all who visit, read, comment, and say the occasional nice thing about the blog on Twitter. It helps!

Photo by Daniel-Nelson on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

No more slidesters, part 6: Publisher 2010’s fall from grace

2011-02-24T07:00:00.003-06:00

I’ve mentioned that I make a lot of my posters in Microsoft Publisher. But this may be about to change.

Publisher 2010 is driving me around the twist.

They’ve done something to the automatic “Align to...” feature that makes it incredibly difficult to get things to align. They added the ability to align objects to other objects, but even when you turn off object alignment (shown), getting corners to snap to the grid is astonishingly fiddly. It just doesn’t work right.

I am not alone in making this observation.

For my latest poster, I just gave up.

I went back Publisher 2003 for the initial layout. I did almost everything there, until I was ready to make some PDFs of the poster. Publisher 2010’s PDF export is fast and excellent, and I still like using that. There are one or two other last minutes that I might tweak in Publisher 2010; fixing typos and the like.

But going so far backwards is pretty sad.

Related posts

No more slidesters, part 1: The wrong tool for the job
No more slidesters, part 2: Three Publisher tips

Learning from Superman

2011-02-17T07:00:00.002-06:00

Face front, True Believers! I am going to tell you about a time before there were comic stores. I know, it’s hard to imagine! But once, you had to scrounge through your local convenience stores and drug stores and check the spinner racks to find your favourite heroes. And because Mom and Pop who ran the shops didn’t read comics themselves, you couldn’t always count on the same same titles coming in from month to month.

That’s right. No boxes. No pull files. No subscription services. No previews as to what the next issue would be. Just a bunch of comics in an unpredictable stack that you had to hunt through to find the good ones.

Comic book makers knew they were competing for attention. The old spinner racks held so many competing titles, and usually didn’t even show the entire cover!

Comic covers had to grab attention, just like a conference poster does. And one of the most important elements on that cover was a great logo – about the only thing that the publisher could count on being visible in the display rack.

Lettering maestro Todd Klein recently picked “Comics’s greatest logos.” He also does logo studies on his blog regularly (alphbetic compilation here). What are the characteristics of a great logo, and what lessons can be applied to posters?

Short

Comic logos are big, short, and bold. Klein wrote about The X-Men:

I think the ideal length for a good comics logo is one word from three to eight letters. One and two letter names tend to read as some kind of abbreviation or symbol rather than a title. Longer names can certainly work, but short ones can be larger and have more impact.

Klein called “Action” in Action Comics “a gift to any designer: a short, punchy word that begins and ends with great diagonals that help express what the word says.”

It’s rare to find a comic title as long winded as Here comes... Daredevil, the Man Without Fear! or Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man. And Klein notes that those sorts of taglines around the main character’s name were often hard to read, since the emphasis was always on the character name.

But the titles of conference posters tend to suffer from the usual academic problem of never using one word when four or five will do.

Shorten your title! Be ruthless in editing. Cut it to the fewest words you can.

Distinctive

Every comic logo tries to be instantly recognizable. You’d never mistake the organic, spooky look of The House of Mystery for the forward leaning The Flash.

This one is tricky for poster makers. While comics presumably could build a readership from month to month, conference posters are one shot affairs. Some ideas are to use a display type for the title, or to get some relevant pictures up in that top area that can act as an entry point.

Dressing

Dressing is the publisher, the price, that old “Approved by the Comics Code” stamp... This is one are that I do not recommend following comics’ lead. In some cases, these can be useful, but in many (most) cases, they just lead to visual confusion.

For poster makers, this means ditch the institutional logos around the title! And don’t feel the need to list the your complete mailing addresses, with postal code, and phone number, and fax number, and email addresses and web site URLs.

Related posts

Learning from Cosmo
Lessons from young readers
Don’t hold my hand

Tone and personality

2011-02-10T07:00:00.019-06:00

I’ve suggested before that you should limit your poster to two typefaces. Typographer Tim Brown would seem to agree. The most relevant stuff to posters starts about 7:37 and goes to about 13:00. Brown is not an energetic presenter, but there is good information there. I’ll sum up here if you only have a minute.

In his talk, he put it this way.

Body text sets the tone.

When considering body text, Brown advises using text that is as close to what will appear in the space as you possibly can. “Lorem ipsum” is good in a pinch, but the closer you can get to what you actually write, the better.

For instance, if there is some key word that repeats over and over, you might find that word looks better in some types than others. Key words with lots of descending letters (g, p, y), or technical one that incorporate numbers, might be particularly good ones to check.

If you don’t have the text of your own ready, use the text from related paper in your field, or an old paper of your own.

Headings, captions, and other markers give text personality.

You don’t want to go too wild with the main body of your poster, but you more freedom with headings. Here are a couple of examples (click to enlarge):

The colour of the heading was set to match a picture in the poster. The wide calligraphic curves were there just to be different.

I would never use a big slab type for the main body of a poster; this particular one doesn’t even have lower case! The colour and type selection here were more deliberate; this poster concerned beach ecology, so I wanted something that would evoke a feeling of sand. So I used that sandy brown and slightly imperfect type.

With headings, you can use those exotic display typefaces and colours without compromising the readability of the main text. That’s a place where you get to play!

Designing for deuteranopes

2011-02-03T07:00:00.003-06:00

People tend to use red, green, and blue on white backgrounds, because those are simple colours that are dark enough to stand out. But that can be a problem for deuteranopes.

Deuteranopia is one form of colour blindness. About 7-8% of men are colour blind in one way or another, with red-green colour blindness of some form being the most common. Thus, chances are that at a reasonably sized conference, someone walking past your poster has issues distinguishing colours that most of us take for granted.

Andy Baio has a great post about reading graphics with his “broke-ass eyes,” as he put it. There are some great tips there.

Did you know that Photoshop has a colour-blind simulator? I didn’t.

Even better, Andy points to Vischeck, an online colorblind simulator. I ran several posters that I had previously critiqued through the simulation. Luckily, most of them held up pretty well. Here are a couple of examples (click to enlarge).

The overall effect is much more monotone, but the poster is still quite legible overall.

This one has a more serious issue. The figure in the upper right corner might not interpreted properly by someone who is red-green colour blind.

If you want to use red and green to distinguish data on a graph, make sure that the data is distinguished by some other characteristic than just colour. Don’t use red and green circles; use red circles and green triangles. Don’t use red and and green lines; use a red solid line and a green dashed line.

And you can’t go wrong with good ol’ black text and lines on a white background.

I found that once I was reminded of how common colour blindness is, I became sensitized to it, and started noticing potential problems. A little planning can go a long way in making your posters legible for colour blind people.

High resolution

2011-01-27T07:00:00.001-06:00

Comic letterer Jim Campbell has been doing workshops on how to letter comics on his blog. A recent post contained this nice summary about image resolution.

All printed material that has any kind of variation in colour or tone is made up of dots of ink on paper. The fineness of those dots in printing terms is defined by the screen frequency, which is measured in lines per inch or lpi.

There is a very complicated formula to enable conversion from dpi to lpi in order to work out optimum resolution, but I worked in newspaper and magazine production for ten years, and the rule of thumb which always worked in my experience is that, for an image that is 100% of printed size, optimum dpi = 2x printed lpi.

Old style B&W newsprint was anything from 45-75 lpi.

Most magazines are 100-120 lpi.

Really glossy brochures, art books and some high-end magazines might be as high as 150-175 lpi.

I would be astonished if there is any comic on the market printing at higher than 150 lpi on internal pages, and 175 lpi on the front cover, so anything higher 350 dpi (call it 400 if you think the artwork might be need to be scaled up at some point) at actual size is nothing more than a waste of hard drive space and CPU clock cycles.

In almost all instances, 300 dpi will be more than sufficient.

It’s nice to have vindication from a pro. Jim’s advice is in agreement with advice I offered before. His advice does imply that you can drop down to 200-250 pixels per inch and it will still look magazine quality.

But the “per inch” is important! Remember, when you’re working with the big canvas of a poster, a picture that’s 600 pixels wide will look great when it’s printed two inches across, but a disaster when it’s printed at twenty inches across. Remember to work out the final printed size will be!

On a related note on resolution, consider this comparison: A computer screen has a resolution of 96 pixels per inch. A printed page might have a resolution on the order of 2,500 pixels per inch. As a result, you can’t figure out how small text will look on the page just by making it small on a computer screen. So you should be prepared to print off at least a piece of your poster at full size and stick it up on a wall several feet from you to see how it will look.

Related post

Never let them see your pixels

Poster Genius: Update

2011-01-20T07:00:00.003-06:00

Poster Genius, which I reviewed here, now has a Mac version. As I’m not a Mac user, email me if you’d like to write a guest post reviewing it.

The SciGen Technologies folks are looking for volunteers to beta test a Linux version. A new PC version of Poster Genius is also in the works.

Spaces are like yo-yo strings...

2011-01-14T08:30:00.001-06:00

You only need one at a time.

Bravo to Farhad Manjoo at Slate for his analysis of double spacing after periods.

“Who says two spaces is wrong?” they wanted to know.

Typographers, that’s who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences.

He goes on to track how this strange convention emerged with the appearance of the manual typewriter, and how this dysfunctional behaviour has persisted for the same reasons so many others have persisted: people repeating bad habits they grew up with.

I thank goodness that the people working on HTML knew this, and made pages render so that multiple spaces are condensed into one.

Hat tip to Björn Brembs. Photo by by ollily on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Critique: First steps in Second Life

2011-01-13T07:00:00.005-06:00

This poster comes via Pat Lockley on Twitter, who was kind enough to share this award winning poster and agreed that I could critique it. Most contests usually evaluate both the content and the graphic design, but I’ll just be focusing on the design. Click the picture to enlarge it.

Where this poster wins in a big way for me is that it has a fantastic entry point. The avatar on the left side is very effective, and follows the Cosmo principle. At a glance from a distance, I know what this poster is about: it’s about pregnancy.

The high proportion of pictures making up the poster is also helpful is making the poster visually appealing. The colours are harmonious, although there are perhaps a few more than there need to be.

The poster’s biggest problem is one that the poster makers acknowledge themselves. The flow from the big avatar to “Arrival and documentation” to “Options and facilities” is quite natural, but then I get confused about where I am supposed to look next. The authors put arrows in the background to try to guide people through the reading order of the poster.

When you find yourself guiding people with those kinds of devices, you’ve failed. You’ve stepped too far away from the rules that people use when reading every day.

I’m also a little bothered that the arrows from from blue box to blue box, leaving me again unsure about the order I’m supposed to read the text. Alternating between the graphics? The text actually flows well, because it follows a simple “top to bottom” sequence. There’s never any point where I’m confused about what bit of text comes next.

Still, even with some of the concerns I have with this poster, there is something quite likable about it. I think part of it is that so many academic posters that I see are so very data heavy that it’s a nice change to see one with so many people on it. Generous pictures and attractive colours go a long way in buying forgiveness for minor faults.

“Information has never been so fun to look at”

2011-01-12T12:33:00.000-06:00

The Scientific American Guest Blog has a post today about information design. Several examples are drawn from Edward Tufte’s books (which you have all read, I hope), but advocacy for increased graphic literacy is always worth a look.

The coolest seminar announcements ever

2011-01-11T07:51:00.000-06:00

While this blog is about conference posters, I cannot resist these wonderful seminar announcements. I’ve never seen so much effort put into advertising a research talk.

Picture by gigpsforscis on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Clearing house

2011-01-08T14:19:00.005-06:00

There's a whole series of little links I’ve been meaning to point to, but none have quite been enough to inspire full length blog posts. So: compilation post!

Keeping track of typefaces is a chore, particularly if you have multiple computers. Wordmark previews all the fonts on your computer in a reasonably compact, “at a glance” format. Great if you’re looking for a the right look for one or two words.

A nice profile of the man who designed the Verdana and Georgia typefaces installed on so many computers, Matthew Carter. It also links to a nice feature on the design of a typeface for phone books (remember those?). I like it because it discusses the problems of making something legible when you have ink spreading over cheap paper.

Thinking With Type is a companion website to the second edition of Ellen Lupton’s book of the same name, and it’s been overhauled recently.

Here are two technical reports: one on City Statistics and another on Italian public transport. They look beautiful at first. A lot of effort has gone into them. But as look at them, ask, “What is the take home message?” The charts are so non-standard that they are almost impenetrable.

Speaking of examples of what not to do, there is probably good data hidden in this chart on health care costs in different countries. But it stands as a warning that glyphs and icons are best used in small numbers. (Hat tip to Junk Charts.)

One bad chart might be regarded as a misfortune. Multiple pages of text like this goes beyond even carelessness. When everything is emphasized, nothing is. (Hat tip to Chris Atherton.)

Finally, a roundup of links on the typeface everyone has an opinion about. Some thing you should avoid it (except for a few special circumstances). Some say it’s criminal. But regardless, it’s always good to keep in mind that there are alternatives not only to the Font-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, but to many other common fonts.

Your New Year’s resolution

2011-01-02T09:05:00.004-06:00

If you don’t know how to use a graphic software package more complex than PowerPoint, make this the year to learn it.

It’s not just about posters any more.

As Andrew Sun points out in this very good post, more and more journals are asking for graphic abstracts. I wrote a little bit about these in my other blog. I like his assessment of the problem:

Some (graphic abstracts) seem like drawn with the Paint program of Windows with freehand (on the mouse); the lines are zigzag, and the colors are limited with a 16-color palette. Some use Comic Sans for texts(.) Some mesh up clip arts from different sources into one graphic which loses consistency in style. Some contain enlarged low resolution clip arts which are severely pixelated.

I disagree with this, though:

All of these are forgivable – after all scientists are not trained as professional computer art designers.

No. Not forgivable. Nobody would ever excuse biologists for not running statistical tests for their experiment because “they’re not professional mathematicians.” Nobody would excuse sociologists for giving rambling, incoherent presentations because “they’re not professional actors.” Nobody would excuse geologists for rampant apostrophe ignorance in manuscripts and papers because “they're not professional writers.”

We acknowledge, accept, and expect that being a professional academic requires a wide range of skills beyond just knowledge of a particular set of content. It is time to make graphic literacy part of that expected skill set.

The ability to create excellent graphics is easier than it has ever been. Yes, it takes practice and thought and is helped by studying materials outside your subject area. But people who can’t make decent graphics are increasingly going to be at a disadvantage to those who can. Don’t be like the unemployed managers who write their resumes on a typewriter.

Andrew goes on to evaluate several graphics programs, and comes out suggesting Inkscape, a free open source vector based software package (currently version 0.48 - quite a way from a full release). I will try review it later.

Additional: Grant Jacobs takes up this discussion at Code for Life.

Deck the halls with conference posters, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-laaaaa...

2010-12-23T07:00:00.026-06:00

Doctor Becca reckons this is the best re-use of a conference poster ever, and I’m inclined to agree. So do many other people! I bugged Becca for the instructions, and she came through like a trooper:

Here’s how:

Cut your poster into six equal-sized squares. You may have some extra bits, but it’s no biggie.
Take one square, fold it into a triangle, and then again into a smaller triangle.
Hold the triangle so that the fully folded side is on the bottom and the longest side is on the right.
Cut four lines parallel to the longest side (cuts shown in blue) – make sure you don’t cut all the way to the left side, just cut so that there are four strips hanging off of the left side.
Open up the square – it should look like this:
Take the two innermost flaps and overlap them so they make a hollow tube. Tape them together.
Flip the paper over to the other side, take the 2nd inner two flaps, overlap them slightly, and tape.
Keep flipping, overlapping and taping until finished. Turn it on its side, and it will look like this:
1/6^th of the snowflake is done!
Do this with the other five squares.
Once all your snowflake portions are made, arrange so that they’re in a nice snowflake configuration. Staple everything together in the middle, as well as the outer “x’s” so they’re not all floppy.
Voila! Winter Wonderland!

Season’s greetings!

Related links

Original post

Push pins : posters

2010-12-16T07:00:00.012-06:00

Here’s another piece of information that might help conference organizers plan their poster sessions: How many pins do you need? Here’s how they do it at one of the biggest scientific conferences in the world:

I received an email from the Society for Neuroscience this week describing the wrap up of the last conference. It included this tidbit:

110,000 push pins ordered to hold 15,116 poster presentations

This works out to 7.277 tacks per poster. An extravagance! You just need one tack for each corner, people!

But wait! There were eight poster sessions (two each, Sunday through Wednesday). Morning presenters could leave tacks for the afternoon presenters, who could leave tacks for the next day.

This means you effectively had 58.2 pins for each poster space.

That’s enough pins not just to attach your poster to the board, but to ensure it would not be cast adrift from its moorings should a small squall suddenly whip up in the middle of the convention center.

Related posts

Photo by Nrbelex on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Fade out

2010-12-09T07:00:00.002-06:00

Earlier this year, I described my experience with printing one of my posters on fabric. After going the conference and presenting the poster, I brought it back and stuck it up in the hallway by my lab, as people often do with their posters.

I was surprised to watch the poster faded into near illegibility over the course of only a few months!

Here’s a picture from shortly after receiving the poster:

And here it is after a few months.

And just for the ultra-detailed comparison, here’s the original source of this picture.

Here’s how my name looked on the poster when I first checked it:

And here’s how it looks after some time in the hallway.

Fading was noticeable after about two months in the hall, I think. This poster is not in direct sunlight, though there is a hall light more or less right above it. Still, another poster right next to it has held its colour much better, and it’s over a year old.

If you print a fabric poster for a conference, keep the original files in case you want to reprint your poster.

Related post

Cut from whole cloth

Grids on grids

2010-12-02T07:00:00.002-06:00

You can’t go too far wrong with a three column grid on a poster.

If it’s very wide poster, 5 or 7 or some other odd number of columns might be appropriate. But I will admit, a straight three column grid can all get just a little... rectangular.

Here’s a trick I learned from the Babylonians. The Babylonians are the ones we have to blame for our twelve hour days. The Babylonians like counting in twelves, rather than ten. Ten can be halved... or divided into five. Twelve can be divided into two, or three, or four, or six. Much more practical.

Create a grid that can be divided in lots of different ways. Or, to think of it another way, create a primary grid (three columns) and lay a secondary grid on top of that. Here, a two column grid superimposed on each main column. That is, six columns total.

Now you’re still following a grid, but you have more options for placement, and you can create a little more visual interest without sacrificing a disciplined layout.

You see this technique from time to time in journal articles, which might have a two column text layout, but will occasionally throw in a figure that is two-thirds of a page wide.

Better to make a complicated grid than abandoning a grid.

Bleeding ink

2010-11-25T07:00:00.001-06:00

A poster is designed with pixels and light, but a poster is made of paper and ink.

It’s easy to forget the differences between the two.

At one conference I was at this year, some of the posters that “popped” used white text on a black background. They tended to have one drawback, though: the text was just a little too thin. It needed to be just a hair thicker.

When you print black text on a white background, the text is going to look ever so slightly larger.

When you print white text on a black background, the text is going to get ever so slightly smaller.

Ink always bleeds into paper. Even with high quality paper and a good printer, it will spread out from where it is placed. The finer the lines, the smaller the text, the more the ink spread comes into play. Failing to take that into account has frustrated type designers trying to capture the feel of classic typefaces.

On a computer screen, putting black text on white background is literally just the inverse of white text on a black background. But white letters emit light, so that if anything, a white letter on a black background will look more luminous on a screen, when ink spread will have the opposite effect when you print the poster.

This is why, as I discussed last time, you would want to have a wide variety of typefaces in your arsenal. For instance, here are some samples of a type called Sense. It comes in seven different weights, and each of those has a corresponding italic version (not shown here):

For a poster, you may want to step up from a regular weight to a medium, particularly if you want to use light text on a dark coloured background.

The other solution, of course, is to make everything on your poster bigger!

“me” picture by mightypeesh on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Ninja type: Finding the right weapon

2010-11-18T07:00:00.000-06:00

Pamela Wilson has a great guest post at IttyBiz about typography, called, “How to Become a Typography Ninja in Five Easy Steps.”

One day, I must learn the art of making snappy titles...

I want to elaborate on one of the recommendations:

(T)he typeface you choose should include regular or book; italic; bold; bold italic at the very least.

If you are working with just the fonts that came with your computer, you are probably getting a very limited set of weights. Sometimes, you don’t get a “book” weight. People will sometimes say, “Oh, that type is no good for text blocks,” but they haven’t seen all the variations of the type.

My computer comes with five versions of Gill Sans, for instance. You don’t have to go far to find that packages that contain over 20 versions of Gill Sans.

For posters, a wider range of type weights than those can be valuable. You might not need 20 versions of the same typeface, but you might need more than “regular.” I’ll talk about why next time. And, to return to the ninja theme, it has to do with bleeding.

Picture by simonella_virus on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Posterface

2010-11-16T16:08:00.001-06:00

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is on of the biggest, most massive exhibitions of conference posters in the world. And this year, neuroscientists at the University of California San Diego decided to pay tribute to this with the release of a music video of the song Posterface by singing sensation, Lady GaBa.

A background in neuroscience is probably helpful to understanding some of the lyrics. But dang, those spiking neurons look so utterly at home in a music video that I’m surprised that they haven’t been used before.

But lest you think this is just recreation by some labbies who’ve dipped into their pharmacological sample, the UCSD team has also put up a web application whereby you can search for posters, upload pictures of posters, and rate them.

Meanwhile, it is encouraging to hear from the SfN floor that there is still so much room to grow this blogging project.

There are still a lot of horrific posters out there.

And speaking of the cane toad of typefaces...

Slash and squeeze

2010-11-11T07:00:00.002-06:00

You’re using PowerPoint to lay out your poster, and you want to include this picture:

You open up PowerPoint 2010, select “Picture with caption” as the layout style, click to import the picture, and you get this:

Once again, PowerPoint is trying to help – just in an incompetent way. It recognizes that the proportions of the picture you want to use are different from the rectangle you’re trying to drop it in to, so it makes a decision that the best thing to do is to make the picture as big as possible, and crop whatever doesn’t fit.

The result is as good as you might expect from a machine blindly following a rule: not satisfactory.

Luckily, one of the improvements in PowerPoint 2010 is that there is a toggle to switch from cropping a picture to scaling a picture. Under “Picture tools: Format,” look for “Crop,” then drop down to select “Fit” rather than fill.

More insidious and common than cropping is squishing. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen distorted pictures in presentations and posters made with PowerPoint.

In PowerPoint 2003, pasting a picture into a box would cause PowerPoint to try to fit the picture into the space by matching the proportions, with results like you see above. PowerPoint 2010 seems to have fixed this problem.

Even so, I still see distorted pictures, presumably from people carelessly resizing pictures. (Use the corner handles when resizing, not the top and side ones!) I wonder if people get so used to distorted pictures that they don’t even realize they are distorted. I think people don’t know how to fix them.

To check that you have the correct proportions, and to correct them if you don’t, right click the picture, and go to “Format picture.”

Then, click on the “Size” tab and look for those height and width percentages. They should be the same. If they are not, first deselect “Lock aspect ratio.” Then, make the larger of the height and width ratios equal the smaller of the two values.

The order you do this matters! It won’t work right if you change the percentages, then removed the “Lock aspect ratio” box.

If you do it correctly, the picture is in the correct proportion. You can then position it to wherever you want on the slide.

Don’t dangle

2010-11-04T07:00:00.036-05:00

This poster is sound. I could quibble about the ever-present boxes, about there being a little too much text in the left column, but the fundamentals that make a better poster are there.

Except that it doesn’t fit in its allotted space.

This was not an isolated case. Because of the size and layout of the conference poster session, I was able to walk through and count how many posters dangled over the edges. There were 18 posters that didn’t fit on the board, out of 400 papers listed in the abstract book.

And the moral of the story for presenters is: Read the instructions!

And the moral of the story for organizers is: About 4.5% of your attendees will ignore my perfectly reasonable advice, which is going to cause problems if you have an unusual poster size.

Names and title of the authors redacted so they don’t think I was picking on them. Lots of other people didn’t read the instructions at this conference, either.

Eye tracking

2010-10-28T07:00:00.005-05:00

The skeptical poster maker reading this blog might say, “But this design stuff... well, it’s all a bit... loosey-goosey, innit?

“Even you yourself ‘ave said that some of the stuff designers say doesn’t stand up. Like the idea that it’s easier to read lowercase because of the shape of the words.”

You want research? Okay, here’s some research on how people read large pages that combine text and images. These are newspapers, not posters, but there’s little doubt that the two are fairly similar reading tasks. Some key findings from older studies:

Photos attracted attention. ... Color was a powerful tool that pulled the eye toward various parts of a page(.)
Eyes followed a common pattern of navigation. The majority of readers entered all pages through the dominant photo or illustration, then traveled to the dominant headline, then to teasers and cutlines, and finally to text.
Images were viewed more than text. Photos and artwork were looked at the most, followed by headlines and advertising, then briefs and cutlines. Text was read the least.

There are also more recent studies that look more at websites, but these also confirm some of the basic design ideas I’ve blogged about here.

Alternative story forms (including Q&As, timelines, lists and fact boxes) helped readers remember facts.
Large photos and documentary photos drew more eyes than small photos or staged photos. Mug shots received relatively little attention.

Now, you might kvetch that I’m not linking to peer-reviewed journals, but there are similar things in peer reviewed papers, like those listed in the references below. A quick peek at Holmqvist and Wartenberg (2005) reveals, for example, the number one factor that influences what people look at first and how long they stay looking at something?

Large size.

So make everything bigger, blast you!

It probably is the case that private companies are doing a lot of reports that are maybe not making it into the traditional academic literature. A lot of this kind of research seems to be in conference proceedings, which I understand is more traditional method of publication for engineering and the like.

Lots of interesting reading on what makes something readable and memorable!

Related papers

Chu S, Paul N, Ruel L. 2009. Using eye tracking technology to examine the effectiveness of design elements on news websites. Information Design Journal 17(1): 31-43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/idj.17.1.04chu

Holmqvist K, Wartenberg C. 2005. The role of local design factors for newspaper reading behaviour – an eye-tracking perspective. Lund University Cognitive Studies 127: 1-21. http://www.lucs.lu.se/LUCS/127/LUCS.127.pdf

Hat tip to Ben Goldacre.

What poster viewers are thinking

2010-10-21T07:00:00.011-05:00

There was a very small but high powered poster session this week. I wasn’t personally there, but a few photos found their way out, and here’s what I expect the viewer is thinking as he looks at some of these posters.

“Is that Comic Sans?”

“Couldn’t they have put the interesting data near the top of the poster?”

“Does everything have to be in a separate box?”

Whoops, forgot to mention who was in the audience above, looking at the posters...

Poster aficionado Barack Obama

These pictures are from the science fair held at the U.S. White House on 18 October 2010, courtesy of Matt Blum, writing on the GeekDad blog. Read more of Matt’s impressions of the event here.

Pictures used under a Creative Commons license.

Paper is more portable than stone tablets

2010-10-19T08:33:00.002-05:00

Tales of the Genomic Repairman presents 10 commandments for poster presentations. Lots of nice bits in there.

I will say in regards to number 7, though...

7^th Commandment: Have thy references. Look if you reference a paper in your poster, bring a hardcopy of each with you and just leave it on the ground. If someone is arguing a point with you that way you can yank the journal shot them the figure and tell em to eat crow. Oh and have about no more than 10 references in your poster.

... that I’ve never had a conversation in front of a poster that would have been advanced by whipping out a reprint.

The secret history of type

2010-10-17T08:17:00.001-05:00

The Guardian has a lovely extract from a new book called Just my Type by Simon Garfield.

I look forward to checking it out, despite the Amazon blurb “why it's okay to like Comic Sans.”

And on reflection, I’d agree with that. It’s okay to like Comic Sans. It’s just not okay to use it.

I’m looking through you

2010-10-14T20:38:00.003-05:00

A coloured background can make a poster pop &ndash when done carefully.

To make a coloured background work, pick your figures carefully. These are the big three pixel-based image formats.

JPG: This is the most popular and familiar format. It is used on the web routinely because it has a wider color range than previous formats (24 bit), and generally has smaller file sizes than other formats.

GIF: This format is older than JPG. It can’t render as many colours as a JPG (8 bit). You can also create short animated images in GIF format, though you couldn’t use that on a poster.

PNG: This GIF successor can render 24 bit colour.

One important difference between these formats is transparency. Here’s a demonstration:

The JPG on the left looks shoddy compared to the GIF on the right.

JPG images can’t do transparencies. Every pixel must be coloured. Images that fine against a white background, like a white sheet of paper, can suddenly be floating in a white rectangle on top of your beautiful poster background. And suddenly, you have started down the road to boxism.

GIF and PNG images can do transparencies, which can allow any underlying colour to show through. It’s not automatic; you do have to watch the setting when you’re saving the image.

If you have an existing JPG that you like, one workaround is to match the space around your image with your poster background. This isn’t difficult if you have a simple background colour, but quickly becomes a headache if you want textured or shaded background.

But if you’re going to go to that much effort to edit the picture, you might as well mask out the background areas, then save a copy in PNG format. This can take a little fiddling in your graphics editor to do, but the result is worth it.

Related posts

Will it scale?
Never let them see your pixels

External links

Wednesday Surgery on Jim Campbell’s Comic Book Lettering Blog

Overcoming your fears in poster sessions

2010-10-07T07:00:00.002-05:00

Over at the Women in Wetlands blog, Dr. Doyenne has been doing a wonderful series of posts looking at self-promotion. In a recent post, Socially Inept Scientists, she talks about how poster sessions are invaluable for those who are uncertain or shy. And let’s face it... that describes a lot of academics, and particularly scientists. I’ve added a little emphasis to her quote.

One very easy and less painful way to meet people is during the poster sessions. There are lots of people standing by their posters expecting (hoping) others will approach them. It’s very awkward for poster presenters to stand there waiting for someone to approach. So they will often be relieved when someone comes along and starts up a conversation. You also have lots of opportunities to meet many people – especially people doing work in your field. However, I’ve found it’s sometimes easier to talk to people who work on topics I know little about. By confiding to the poster presenter that you don’t know anything about their field puts them at ease. Students and young scientists are especially afraid some expert is going to come along and ask them a question they can’t answer or will disparage their work. So, they will be especially open to someone who knows little about their topic. Ask them to explain their work to you (you can say you’ve always been fascinated with the topic, but that it is outside your field). By doing so, you put them into the role of expert and you in the role of interested listener. Few people can resist an opportunity to be looked upon as the more knowledgeable in a conversation.

The rest of her series on self-promotion is wonderful, useful stuff. Check it out. Start with To Brag or Not to Brag, and carry through the rest of the September posts, and continuing through October.

Photo by TeodoraS on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Coral reef science

2010-10-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

Malaria, Bed Bugs, Sea Lice, & Sunsets, has an interesting gallery of posters from the 11^th International Coral Reef Symposium, from July of this year.

Some are an overkill of words. Others let the data do the talking. And then some are just simply beautiful works of art, in my opinion.

Dear conference organizers

2010-09-30T07:00:00.018-05:00

Poster sessions can be the beating heart and transcendent soul of a conference, or the first thing on the list at the bitch session afterward. Here’s how you conference organizers can help your attendees love your poster session.

Give us space – lots of it. 15 square feet minimum. 20 square feet or more is even better. Get the square footage of the room you are planning on holding the session in, and divide it by the number of posters. (Hat tip to Jim Belanger for this observation!)

Not all at once. It’s tempting to put all the posters in a single related topic together. It makes them easier to find. But don’t forget, people who are presenting posters are often the the very people who most want to see those other posters on the same topic. Give presenters a chance to look around; they want to see other stuff, too.

Lighting. Too many poster session rooms are wannabe nightclubs. They’re just too dim. And given that scientists tend to make dubious colour choices, as I have documented in this log many times, it can make it hard to read the poster.

Flat floor. What could possibly go wrong with posters on tripods on stairs?

Nothing in the walkways. Too often, there is a table stuck apparently at random in the the middle of a corridor. Suddenly, you have a traffic jam. Put everything at the end of the poster row.

Water. All that talking can make you thirsty. Make sure there is a source of water readily and constantly available that doesn’t require someone to leave the session for ten minutes. Other refreshments are nice, but nothing beats water.

Photo by kirinqueen on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

PowerPoint posters: Don’t turn away for even a second

2010-09-23T07:00:00.005-05:00

If you use PowerPoint to make a conference poster, remember that it’ll screw you if you’re not watching it closely.

It has the best intentions. It’s just trying to help. But intentional or not, it still screws you.

The problem arises when you try to stick a lengthy block of text into a text box that is too big. PowerPoint will try to make all those words fit.

It’s fairly obvious when PowerPoint changes the point size. Point size is prominently displayed on the ribbon, and when you right click the text. But point size isn’t the only thing PowerPoint fiddles with.

PowerPoint tries to preserve the point size whenever it can. To keep the words as large as possible, it will first rachet down the line spacing (a.k.a. leading). A mild case is shown above.

To check the spacing in PowerPoint 2010, right click the text and select the “Paragraph...” option. This will show line spacing options. PowerPoint 2003 users will go to the “Format” menu, then look for “Line Spacing...”

From there, you can set if from “Multiple” back to “Single,” or even better, a value bigger than 1.

You can turn this “autofit” option off, but you have to dig for it. In PowerPoint 2010, you have to go up to the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” (The down arrow in the upper left) and pick “More commands.” You’ll be in the main “Options” menu, at the “Quick Access Toolbar” section. Look left and up to find then go to “Proofing” section. Then look for “AutoCorrect Options...” and pick the second tab, “AutoFormat As You Type.” Finally, uncheck “AutoFit body text to placeholder.”

No, the PowerPoint team don’t exactly go out of their way to make it easy to find.

Here’s the single spaced version:

This one paragraph on its own may not look so bad, but people making posters with PowerPoint often end up with a lot of text boxes. Because the PowerPoint squishes the text in each box differently, you can easily end up with of different line spacing all across the poster. One paragraph with single space, another paragraph with 0.8, another with 0.9...

Lack of consistency makes a poster look sloppy, even if a viewer may not be able to say exactly why.

Related posts

Leading thoughts

Myths of beautiful text

2010-09-16T07:00:00.001-05:00

Ian Millington has suggestions about making text look good. He’s talking about text on the web, but there is some material relevant to posters.

Some claims are supported more by tradition than anything else, but this is often the case with text. For instance, Millington, in agreement with many other typographers, claims:

First-language English readers recognize words by their shape(.)

Kevin Larson lays this claim to waste in one of the most epic articles I have ever read on the science of reading, complete with a lengthy reference list of peer-reviewed research articles.

Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word.

I also think Millington is too hard on sans serif fonts, geometric fonts, and white paper. (And, as a neurobiologist, I also think that he overuses the term “hardwired” for the brain.) But lots of good ideas nevertheless.

Hat tip to Chris Atherton, WildWinter, Jan Schultnik, and Daniel Tenner.

RTFP?

2010-09-09T07:00:00.007-05:00

What the least read book in the world?

The owner’s manual.

What fraction of your owner’s manuals have read completely? Your car? Your digital camera? Your graphics software?

Recently, I put up a Venn diagram showing what people put on posters versus what people want from posters. That resonated with some ideas that Kathy Sierra discussed in an online presentation. in particular, she showed another version of this figure from from her brilliant and much-missed Creating Passionate Users blog.

Which attracts you and makes you want to learn more?

Most posters look more like less like the brochures on the left and a lot more like the owner’s manuals on the right. I think posters look like owner’s manuals because people are aping journal articles.

Remember the trap? Making a poster is often the first time you’re thinking through the data. And it’s easy to think more about, “How is that data is going to go into the paper I eventually want to publish?” than “What’s right for the poster?”

Related posts

Should your first presentation be a poster?

Poster Venn

Poster Venn

2010-09-02T07:00:00.001-05:00

If you’ve presented or viewed posters, you’ve probably noticed there’s a lot of stuff on them that don’t really matter.

We put them on because we want to mimic scientific papers. References are a great example. Several of my colleagues are of the opinion that any academic work without a reference list is unacceptable. Listening to some, you’d think that such a poster would cause the conference hall to explode and leave every molecule in your body streaming away from the center of the blast at near the speed of light.

So we cave. We stick on a terminal reference list in Harvard format that nobody looks at. It might be shorter than the one in the published paper, but few dare to cut it entirely.

Graphic inspired by xkcd.

Related posts

References on posters
Containment

Okay, you win

2010-09-01T23:01:00.000-05:00

PowerPoint is the wrong tool for making posters.

But it is the most popular software for doing so, by a wide margin. So says the survey I ran on my blog all summer long, though the thick of the conference season (1 May to 31 August).

Over the coming weeks and months, I plan dig in to find the features that might allow you to cobble together a decent poster in PowerPoint. I recently bought Office 2010, which obviously includes the latest version of PowerPoint. I never upgraded to PowerPoint 2007, so I’m just starting to learn where all the knobs and dials are in PowerPoint 2010 compared to the 2003 version.

I may be holding my nose while I write the PowerPoint posts. And I’ll be admonishing you to get a real graphics software package every time. But they will be coming.

More power! The poster with a plug

2010-08-26T07:00:00.001-05:00

One of the most unusual posters I saw at the International Congress of Neuroethology meeting in August was this one, being presented by Yossi Yovel:

You might not immediately recognize what’s different about this poster. Title, data, and boxes, the omnipresent boxes... It is mounted a little low. And some might recognized that the story has already been published, which is slightly unusual for a conference poster.

Allow me to point out...

The video screen.

That’s right, they were showing video of their bats behaving on their poster. This took some work. They found a cheap, small portable television, and they had to make a fairly complex set of adjustable metal braces, to allow for the fact that they didn’t know the size of the poster board. You need to be close to a power outlet, as you can see in this “behind the curtain” shot:

It seems a much more elegant solution than trying to find some space to hold up a laptop screen to someone. I got wondering if there was a simpler way to do this, and I thought of this.

Go online and buy some cheap second hand portable media player. There are lots that play video. An iPod nano, a Sansa, iRiver...
Transfer the videos over.
Add simple directions to the poster to the poster for how to see the video.
Attach the player to your poster with some double sided mounting tape or something similar.

Reference

Yovel Y, Falk B, Moss CF, Ulanovsky N. 2010. Optimal Localization by Pointing Off Axis. Science 327(5966): 701-704. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1183310

Academics and typefaces

2010-08-21T12:11:00.001-05:00

Head over and see what Gripping Cell has to say on the subject. Hat tip to Biochembelle.