If, by chance, you are planning to go to Bordeaux this year to attend the Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting, the organizers have created this great prep session. Warning: Contains me.
Notwithstanding my own pleasure at being asked to participate, I think this is a fantastic service from the organizers. Too many conference organizers put up very minimal guidelines for presentations, and that’s it.
A chance for presentations focused on best practices, and a point of view, and a chance to ask questions far enough in advance for people to make corrections is incredibly valuable.
In one month (or less, depending on when you read this), I will be giving a free online talk, thanks to the kind invitation from the good people at Reproducibility 4 Everyone!
On February 8, illustrator Mark Belan gave a talk at McMaster University for the Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship. It was a wide ranging talk on design, and even contained a few slides about poster design.
This post is for my fellow educators. How can you best use posters in a course?
There are a few reasons you might want to have students make posters for a class. Probably the biggest one is practice for presenting a poster in a professional setting, like a conference. Same reason we ask students, even undergrads, write in journal format: to give them practice communicating like professionals.
I’m going to give an outline for how I integrate posters in a science communication course.
The science communication course I teach is one semester class for advanced undergraduates.
The poster “officially” takes up only one week of the class, but several exercises before I give students the poster assignment build up and reinforce what I ask students to do in the poster module.
In the first few weeks of the course, I ask students to prepare standard application materials like a CV or résumé and a personal statement. This is usually fairly straightforward in terms of content, because students are writing about themselves. These modules give me a chance to talk about typography. I use these modules to emphasize the importance of good typography in the appearance of a professional document.
The learning objective within the applications module:
Describe key elements of typography that improve the appearance of documents.
A couple of weeks later, I ask them to create a few simple plots of data. I usually give them some raw weather data (say, a month of temperature data from two different cities) and ask them to make a few standard summary diagrams like bar graphs (with error bars!) and scatter plots. This module gives me a chance to talk about data visualization and introduce some basic concepts of graphic design.
The learning objectives for the graphing module:
Describe advantages of plotting data.
Describe and use best practices for creating tables for publication in scientific journals.
Describe and use best practices for creating graphs for publication in scientific journals.
In this particular course, I don’t ask students to make a poster about their own project. (They do have a project, but I ask them to do an oral presentation instead.) Instead, I tell them to base their poster on a recently published open access journal article.
The advantage of asking students to modify a published article instead of making a poster of their own class project is that I want students to edit. It’s often easier to edit someone else’s work than your own.
I tell them:
Do not "dump" the paper into the poster
and be done with it! That will get you a crummy score, guaranteed! The
best posters are likely to be the ones that are the most different from the original paper. For an example, compare a paper I published here to a poster I made about the same project here (from this blog post). The paper has ten figures; the poster has only five. The difference in the number of words is obvious.
The learning objectives for the poster module:
Describe how posters are presented in academic conferences.
Create a design brief for a conference poster.
Describe basic concepts used in graphic design.
Describe and use several best principles for conference poster design.
Design a conference poster.
Use a checklist to evaluate your poster.
Of course, they also end up revisiting some of the learning objectives from the previous modules.
I direct students to a checklist here on this blog to assess their own posters. I use a modified version of the checklist as the scoring rubric.
After the students design and submit their poster, I ask them to do a round of peer review. In an online course, I do this using a discussion forum. Depending on how the semester is going, I might give students an opportunity to resubmit a poster for a revised grade.
Later, I have students give an oral presentation of their class project, and that gives them another opportunity to revisit some of the graphic design and typography skills from the poster module.
This week, I am pleased to be speaking at the National Biotechnology Conference! I’ll be presenting on Thursday, 20 May, at 8:00 am Eastern Daylight Time on poster design.
Some of the conference content was available last week, so I went in and looked at how this meeting is handling posters.
As I’ve mentioned before, the concept of a “poster session” in an online space is an interesting thing. Different meetings have handled them in very different ways.
Below is a screenshot of one sample poster, just pulled by happenstance. I have blurred the title and authors, and at the preview scale, the rest is not really readable.
The conference provided a limited number of poster templates, so my focus is not on the poster design, but the viewer experience.
How it works is that when you click “View eposter,” a preview screen pops up that shows you an overview of the entire poster.
You can see controls for the poster – menu, forward and backward arrows – down in the lower left corner.
If you read comics using an app like Comixology, the poster experience is rather like their “Guided view.” You step through each individual panel of the comic or poster, then advance to the next one. In the poster situation, though, you have the option of playing narration.
The poster is scattered with little “sound” icons. These are obviously added in by the software, because the icons cover
parts of text and graphs. There was clearly no consideration of where
the icons would fit into the design.
Every section with an icon has a pre-recorded message.
When you click play, you can hear narration recorded by the presenter. There is no “autoplay” through the entire poster. You have to click to advance to each section.
Judging from a few posters picked haphazardly, if you just listen at
normal presentation speed, it takes about six to eight minutes to listen
to a presenter walk you through a poster.
Luckily, the “speedometer” icon allows you to play it faster (unspecified, but I think it might be 1.5×, 1.75× and 2× regular speed). A nice touch.
I have not made a comprehensive review of all posters, but I will say that sometimes listening to the narration is an odd experience. On text blocks, many presenters start reading the text exactly as written on the poster, but then deviate from it at unpredictable points. The transition from following along to trying to parse the difference between what is written and what is said is jarring.
It feels a lot like people reading PowerPoint slides. And we know what crushing experience that is. Most people read faster than presenters talk.
Eposters mimic one aspect of some paper posters. Despite seeing only one
panel at a time, it’s often hard to read the text because people write
too much stuff that is too small. Even when I’m viewing a a
single panel full screen, I see sections that I cannot hope to read
without learning in uncomfortably close to my screen.
You can also download the poster as a PDF.
So while this is technically a kind of interesting way of presenting, I’m still unsure why this should even be called a “poster.” In practice, it feels like it would be much more natural either to have people record slide talks or upload a single static document, like a manuscript.
Last week, I gave a presentation online to the University of New Hampshire. They recorded it, and have generously made the recording not only available to their campus community, but to everyone.
You can find the workshop here. As of now, I don’t know if there is a way to embed the video.
Thanks to the four rugged individuals who agreed to let me review their posters. I gave each poster a nickname:
The kitchen drawer poster
The “Too much coffee” poster
The tombstone poster
The “Just a trim” poster
The video is extra convenient, because you can listen to it at one and a half or even double speed, pause, or rewind it – unlike me!
Next month, hot on the heels of the release of the Better Posters book (available for pre-order now!), I will be giving a workshop at the University of New Hampshire.
I’m looking forward to this workshop, because several brave souls have said they are willing to send me their work in advance so we can look it over and actually work out how to improve it. It’s nice to have specific examples to look at so that people can see the process.
I not only wanted to say how much I am looking forward to talking to everyone at University of New Hampshire, I also wanted to say:
Book me!
I am available to talk to your students! I am available to talk on your podcast! I will answer interview questions that are emailed to me!
Word Lab Sessions is an online place for casual conversation about linguistics in academia. I stumbled across their upcoming session on Instagram and though it would be of interest for some readers, particularly for any of you who are in Europe or Africa. (The time differences make it an early morning for someone in western North America!)
This is just one of several sessions they have hosted. Another general topic coming up is “The Fundamentals of Writing an Academic Paper” on September 16. (It‘s good to know even linguists have to work at this.) Most of their session focus on linguistics, so if linguistics is your main wheelhouse, definitely check them out!
A quick reminder that I will be speaking at Plant Biology 20 this Wednesday, 29 July!
Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EDT
Get Your Message Across: A Guide to Artwork and
Illustrations for Better Impact and Clarity
Speaker:Magdalena M.
Julkowska, PhD – KAUST Speaker:Patrice A.
Salomé – UCLA Speaker:Zen Faulkes Chair:Ivan Baxter,
Ph.D – Donald Danforth Plant Science Center Chair:Mary Williams
Update, 9 August 2020: An archived version of the workshop is now online here. In particular, all the speakers went through the chat transcript and added many more comments to the questions, many of which we could not answer live during the session.
This week, I’ve been tweeting about posters at the IAmSciComm Twitter account. Most of the topics are ones I’ve blogged about before, but I made lots of new images just for these threads, and I think I made some points better there than I have before here.
And I got to use a lot of GIFs. I mean, a lot a lot.
This blog exists to help solve a problem: that academic conference posters are ugly. But I am under no illusions that this blog is going to fix the problem. So, what would move the dial the quality of conference posters?
When faced with this kind of question, I often see people say, “We should include this in our training for students!”
As an educator, I never want to be the person to say we shouldn’t train students. I’ve done it myself, often. I support this sentiment, but I’m wary of calls for “more training,” for two reasons.
First, suggestions for “more training” make me worry about mission creep. Over time, I’ve heard that students need more training in statistics. And in writing. And in ethics. And in grantsmanship. And in social media. And diversity issues. And in dealing with media. And in public outreach. And so on.
Don’t get me wrong, these are all worthy topics where I think training would be beneficial. But there is only so much we can realistically expect to make students competent in during their time in our programs. It’s hard enough to attain competence and eventual mastery in one discipline.
Second, graphic design is a professional skill that takes years of study and practice. “Training” research students in graphic design would probably end up being a few credit hours over a multi-year program, taught by a non-professional (e.g., a research scientist in the department who is smart enough not to use Comic Sans but never took a class in design) rather than a skilled graphic designer (e.g., someone from over in an art department who does this on a daily basis). (And I say that as someone who has been asked to do those kinds of classes and workshops. I mean, I’m that guy!) I worry that calling for training could trivialize the skills needed for excellent design and become a curricular box-checking exercise.
Instead of expecting academics to become one person bands, we should try to create more access and respect for experts in other fields and be willing to use them, credit them, and pay them.
Picture from randychiu on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
Today was the abstract deadline for the next meeting in January 2019 in Tampa, Florida. Did you put in a poster abstract?
If you did, I want to help! I am planning on doing a short online class to have SICB students and post-docs make posters that rock.
If you are interested in taking a short online class to improve your poster for the Tampa meeting, click here to go to a form! I need to judge interest so I can plan on the best way of making the class happen.
A couple of months back, I was one of the instructors in the #SciFund poster making class. We had decided to require everyone make their posters in Adobe Illustrator, which I have never used before. This freaked me out a little bit, and I knew that if I was going to be useful to students, I would have to figure out Illustrator myself.
I decided that I had to make a poster at the same time the students were. I just had one problem: I wasn’t going to a conference this summer, so I had no actual need to make a poster. I decided to tackle the data on a paper that was going through the editorial process at the time, and was finally released today (Faulkes 2015).
I wasn’t extraordinarily diligent in documenting my process, but I did try. This first one is fairly early in the process (click to enlarge):
What surprises me in retrospect is that from a distance, this first one is very similar to what I ended up with. The basic layout decisions – five columns, three pictures in the middle – served me pretty well. But you could not hang in a conference. Obviously, pictures are missing, and if you click to enlarge, you will see a lot of silly placeholder text (from a variety of sources).
Despite that I normally tell people they don’t need logos, I
included one mainly because it looked like I would had space left over.
This was a simple way to fill it, and the colours matched the picture.
A few steps later, and the poster already looks very close to done. But as we’ll see, looks can be deceiving.
First, I ditched the standard “IMRAD” headings. My idea was to try to make the poster quickly readable by making every heading a key question or finding. That way, you only had to read a few sentences to get the gist of the poster.
Second, I pulled in colour. It just happened that the pictures I found tended to have green and orange in them, which, coincidentally enough, was the colour scheme for the new University of Texas Rio Grande Valley mascot. I used the eyedropper to duplicate colours from the mascot and photos to the headings, the box around the pictures, the title, and so on.
Third, I put in the data. I considered making graphs, but I kept thinking that these were simple, easy to understand numbers, and there were not very many of them. The central graphic is, in essence, the thing I tell people to never put on a poster: a table! But it’s a table with photos, lots of space, and no “data prison.”
Fast forward a few more steps:
The obvious change when you see the thumbnail is that I’ve moved the mascot. I placed the mascot in the lower right corner following the Cosmo principle: that’s where the least important stuff goes. The problem was that the Vaquero was facing outwards, leading your eyes off the poster. I moved it one column over, just because I didn’t want to move it very far.
But that wasn’t far enough!
Now the mascot is clearly facing into the poster, leading your eye into the next section of text. Much better.
You can’t see at a glance are all the changes to the text I’m making as I go, too. But trust me, there is a lot of editing and rewriting going on.
This is the final version:
I know it doesn’t look all that much different from the second image above, but there are so many chances that you can’t see in the thumbnail. They are the little things like increasing the text size, changes in wording, and the space between the lines. They are almost subliminal differences, but they all add up to a much nicer appearance, as I wrote about here.
One of the last changes was which numbers I used in the central graphic. I rounded the percentages up to got rid of the decimals. They just weren’t necessary. I also changed which numbers I showed in the second row, which much more clearly indicated the popularity of one species (almost half of all sales!).
The decision about which numbers to show on this poster, in fact, led to me asking the editors to make some last minute changes in the published paper. Because I was forced to grapple how to show things clearly and visually on a poster that I realized there were some nice improvements I could make to the paper.
I’ve given just a few examples of the stages in making this poster in this post, but you can watch the development with more steps in this video:
We’re in the thick of the #SciFund poster class now! One of the fun things for me about being involved is that we’re doing stuff that I haven’t covered in this blog.
In particular, Anthony Salvagno has written a lot about how to use Adobe Illustrator to make a poster. I had not used Illustrator before I started working on this class. It is powerful, but not simple. Anthony’s tips and suggestions are just the thing if you have been curious about using Illustrator for making posters.
I’m going to collect all the #SciFund poster class links here for archival purposes. As I post this, just two are up, but I will add the next three weeks as the become available.
#SciFund poster class links
Week 1: Focusing on message and getting started with Adobe Illustrator Week 2: Developing a draft and building your wireframe with Illustrator Week 3: Creating images and graphs Week 4: Working with text Week 5: The home stretch
This is the first time we’re charging for a #SciFund class (US$50), so I’d like to address is a question I’m sure many people will ask:
“What am I getting for my money?”
Valid question. After all, I’m one of the instructors, and this blog exists to spread ideas I have about poster design around for free. If someone read all the entries in this blog, you would probably have a very good idea of some of the things I’d be talking about in the class.
One benefit of the class is that you’ll be able to have a lot of interaction with the instructors. It isn’t just me leading the class; I’ll be joined by Anthony and Jai. And while a blog is static, working in the class will not be.
Perhaps more importantly, you will get to have a lot of interaction with other students in the class. In a class like this, the opportunity to get the ideas and feedback of others can be invaluable, because different people bring such different ideas about style.
Another thing that you get from being in the class is that we do have plans to offer a certificate of completion for those who make it all the way through. This could be useful in demonstrating that you’ve been engaged in professional development activities.
Once again, you can click hereto register for the class! I hope you will join us!
Academic conference posters are often ugly, with tiny text, confusing layouts, and dubious colour schemes. This blog and book is about making posters informative and beautiful.
This blog usually updates on Thursdays.
Not the viral video. That’s #BetterPoster (singular) on social media.
“Great blog with constantly updated resources.” - The Scientist magazine
“The ‘Go To’ place to send students when they start preparing posters for their first scientific meetings” – Bora Zivcovik
“I wish there were more blogs on this subject(.) Mostly because most scientific poster presentations are absolutely ghastly. Not just bad, or unseemly; ghastly.” – RobertSOakes
“I want to passive-aggressively run around poster sessions putting up Post-it notes with his url on every poster.” – Dominque
“Better Posters blog is A - MAZE-ING” – A. Roehrich
“I find the Better Posters site comforting. I can’t possibly be as bad as some of them there.” – Anne Jefferson
“@DoctorZen's Better Posters Blog is blowing my mind. Love it! #useful” – Elizabeth Sargent
“It’s @DoctorZen’s better poster blog’s fault as to why my poster looks classy & timeless.” – Ricardo Vilain
“Was man alles beachten muss, um ein gutes Poster abzuliefern, an dem die Kollegen auch stehen bleiben, kann man im Blog Better Posters lernen(.)” – Alles was lebt
“recommending reading @doctorzen Better Posters Blog to sci presenters. And anyone who will listen.” – @andrea1
“Should be compulsory reading for academics.” – @sthcrft
“Better Posters blog dispenses solid (much-needed) advice; recognises synergy between aesthetics+info” – Jason Priem
“I’m loving @DoctorZen’s http://betterposters.blogspot.com/ & happy to find I’ve been following the rules! Will show this to ALL students.” – @_modscientist_
“Just put up my poster, it looks fab thanks to @DoctorZen!” – @_modscientist_
“Make sure you read http://betterposters.blogspot.com” – @boris_gorelik
“Conference season is descending upon us, and @DoctorZen's blog will save scientists a lot of grief” – Andrea Wishart
“It's super useful especially to those of us who have a hard time figuring out what is awesome and what is eye-bleedingly terrible.” – Miriam Goldstein
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