Critique: Biconcave backbones in 3-D!

Friend of the blog Mike Taylor gave me the okay to share this poster some time ago. Get out your 3-D glasses, and click to enlarge!

This poster has, dare I say, a touch of elegance to it.

Part of what gives this poster its style is the serif type. At a glance I was reasonably sure that it was not Time New Roman, which a closer inspection confirmed:

The downward serif on the “2” is very distinctive, and helps identify this as some form of Baskerville. This is an example of how doing something just slightly different leaves an impression.

Serifs can sometimes be difficult to see at a distance, but the large size and generous spacing keep it legible.

Big photograph taking up a lot of the space? Love it. When this is on the poster board, it should sit right at eye level.

The layout of the poster clearly shows this poster is meant to be read across in rows. The single continuous margin between the second and final rows signals that clearly.

What about the 3-D glasses I mentioned? It isn’t immediately obvious, but the photograph in the lower right corner can be viewed in 3-D using red-green glasses. I love it when posters can break into the third dimension, and it’s a shame that this technique is a bit tricky to implement. 

If you want to use this 3-D technique, there are two pain points. 

First, you need to get your own 3-D glasses, since conference goers are not likely to be carrying their own in their backpack. A super quick search shows that you can get them for as little as 45 cents or less, but you have to buy in bulk. Personally, I think that is a reasonably small fraction of what going to a conference costs.

Second, you need test the printer your poster will be printed from. Ink on paper may not look the same as light on a computer screen. To work well, the tint of the glasses has to match the colours on the printed image. The more exact the match of the colour on the lens to the colour on the paper, the better. I suggest making a small version of the 3-D image that can be printed alone to test how it looks with your glasses, so you don’t have to print the entire poster.

Thank you, Mike, for sharing! 

Related posts

Critique: Dinosaur necks 

External links

The “Biconcavoposeidon” poster is published  

Baskerville vs. Times New Roman 

Critique: Minimalist RNA

I spotted today’s poster when researching the Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science conference for the June link roundup. I reached out to its creator, Jakub Zeman, who sent along a copy and how he made it. Click to enlarge!

I’ll let Jakub tell the story from here (lightly edited). 

Our model focuses on how pluripotent stem cells develop into cardiomyocytes. Cells make multiple decisions over several days to become the correct cell type. My research explores how this is regulated at the translation level. Many processes signal to ribosomes the need for specific proteins to be made. We believe that ribosomes are the key decision-makers, producing those proteins in the right quantities at the right time. Thus, the ribosome is a central element in my poster.

I had previously experimented with the #BetterPoster concept, but for this special conference (Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science), I decided to take it to the next level. 

I was focused on making figures for our latest manuscript, so I opted for simple vector graphics and minimal charts to illustrate my story. 

The ribosome is complex, but can be simplified to a basic shape that represents large and small subunits. I added a ribbon symbolising the newly formed protein. The mRNA molecule is usually depicted as a straight line passing through the ribosome, but this time, I represented it with an interface between two differently coloured spaces.

In the top section, I showcased examples of cellular processes communicating with ribosomes.

In the bottom section, I presented a sequence of cell types recapitulating cardiac differentiation, along with two simple charts, and all other necessary details.

I chose a palette with four colours: two close ones for the background and two distinct ones for the ribosomal subunits. For different cell types, I created a sequential colour palette to illustrate how they get closer to becoming cardiomyocytes with each step.

I designed my poster using Affinity Designer on macOS, using different weights of Helvetica Neue to highlight key text while maintaining a clean and simple typography.

By limiting myself to simple shapes, few colours, and minimal charts, I created a poster that deviates significantly from a traditional scientific poster. But I use a poster as a visual aid to tell my story, aiming to engage viewers and encourage interaction, rather than having them silently read the dense text and charts.

I admire this poster’s boldness and simplicity. There is only one thing that I question: the rays of words surrounding the small subunit at the top. By the time you reach the rightmost phrase, “RNA modification,” you are reading almost upside down.

I made some similar text in PowerPoint.

 Kind of tough to read those three words and phrases on the right.

 One alternative: stack the letters.

But you are almost forced to use all caps here to prevent letters with descenders (like “g”) dropping down and running into adjacent letters. The variable width of the letters also contributes to making this hard to look at. And because we are not used to characters being stacked, these long words are hard to read. 

Second alternative:

I like this more than my stacked letter option. But it would be nice if there was an even number of words, because then you would have an even number facing each direction.  This, to me, is more readable even though it is less consistent.

Normally, consistency is a good thing! But sometimes readability is more important than consistency. Have a look at this soundtrack cover for an upcoming movie:

This logo has four names arranged in a circle. Three of the names (“Richards,” “Storm,” and “Storm”) have the bottom of the letters towards the center of a circle. But for the fourth name, “Grimm,” the top of the letters are towards the center of the circle. 

Thanks to Jakub for sharing his work! 

Related posts

Link roundup for June 2025 

Link roundup for June 2025

Let’s see if I can get back into a regular rhythm of posting these!

• • • • •

There continues to be a small group working on creating posters by computing methods.

A new preprint by Pang and colleagues not only dives into poster creation, with a program called PosterAgent, but how to evaluate computationally generated posters, called Paper2Poster. Existing poster assessment rubrics are not good for evaluating computationally generated posters, because the computer makes mistakes that humans don’t make.

(O)ur Paper2Poster pipeline, built on a fully open-source toolbox... surpasses existing GPT-4o–based multi-agent approaches on nearly all metrics while consuming 87% fewer tokens.

While they claim their Paper2Poster assessment rates posters similarly to humans, it’s worth noting their comparison is based on one human rating five posters.

Their technique involves converting completed academic papers to posters. Since most posters are made well before a paper is ready for publication, we are still a long way from something that will be useful to most poster makers. And I’m not sure large scale automation for poster creation is necessary.

Pang W, Lin KQ, Jian X, He X, Torr P. 2025. Paper2Poster: Towards multimodal poster automation from scientific papers. arXiv: arXiv:2505.21497. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21497

• • • • •

Benedikt Ehinger  has created Illustrator templates for conference posters that are free to use. Here’s an example:

Because it’s in Illustrator, there are a couple of features that you might not find in other static templates. 

1. Box backgrounds adjust for titles.
2. Borders can be easily resized; the curves don’t change with rescaling.

• • • • •

Staying with Benedikt for a moment, he also makes art from his graduate students’ theses. Examples:

 The plot above is made from the first 10.000 letters of the student’s thesis.

Benedikt writes:

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. 

• • • • •

If you are teaching using conference posters, Stefanile has a paper that describes how to teach people how to present posters:

(T)he approach of preparing a poster, emphasized here, involved a collaborative effort between the presenter and their colleagues/mentor to properly prepare the poster, particularly emphasizing the use of consistent best practices when presenting the poster. 

Stefanile A. 2025. Designing and presenting an oral poster presentation for undergraduate students’ research. Natural Sciences Education 54: e70018. https://doi.org/10.1002/nse2.70018 

• • • • •

Sticking with teaching, Nicola Koyama has built in some self-assessment practices that help students engage with the material. Excerpt:

Some of Nicola’s students aren’t keen at first, she says “I think they grumble having to do something. But then at the end... they’re excited to know whether they've judged their poster correctly.”

Koyama N. 2025. Know where you atand: How incentivized self-assessment transforms poster presentations. Liverpool John Moores University Student Experience Proceedings Special edition: Case studies in assessment and feedback design: https://doi.org/10.24377/studentexp3175

• • • • •

I have frequently reference Nate Piekos and Blambot, one of my favourite supplier of comic style fonts, but I am not sure I have referred to his page of compiled lettering tips.

This line cheat may be helpful in some poster layout situations, where you might be able to gain a line back to make text fit into allotted spaces better.

• • • • • 

This next paper doesn’t mention posters directly, but is one of the best discussions I have ever read about the challenges of holding an online conference that feels like a conference and not a Zoom call. 

The problems are partly organizational. The organizers wanted real time events, not asynchronous ones. This meant figuring out events for many time zones.

The problems are partly technical. What software exists that can make people feel like they re in physical spaces that encourage the equivalent of hallway conversations? They describe an app called QiQoChat, which I have not heard of before.

The organizers also realized that they needed events that would bring people together. For one, they live music. 

This paper encourages me to think that a good online poster session is possible. Recommended.

Bastian M, Flatø EH, Baraitser L, Jordheim H, Salisbury L, van Dooren T. 2022. ‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality. Geo: Geography and Environment 9(2): e00114. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/geo2.114

• • • • •

In two gynecology conferences, 46.8% of oral presentations were published compared to just 14.2% of poster presentations. As is common, there is no discussion of why this difference exists or whether tany steps should be taken to try to increase the amount of publications deriving from posters.

Rotem R, O’Leary BD, McCarthy CM, O’Reilly BA, O'Sullivan OE. From conference to journal: Analyzing the path to publication for EUGA and JOGS 2022 abstracts. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics: in press. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijgo.70319

• • • • •

This conference report makes me regret that I wasn’t able to attend Woodstock of Biology² + Night Science (#TCTeAC on Bluesky).  Presenters got walk-up music, there was a wedding (!), questions people were too embarrassed to ask, and much more. Seen from a distance, it sounds like it feels like Science Online meetings used to. It sounds like a lot of fun was had on top of the science.

But. 

Poster session in the forest — because… why not?

 (Photo from Barak Rotblat on Bluesky.)

Although it is apprently a volleyball court in a forest.

(Photo by Nir Eynon.)

(Photo by Zoe Harrington on Bluesky.)

(Picture from Claire on Bluesky.)

Um. I, personally, can think of several reasons why not. I know some people would see one tiny woodlands creature and be, “THERE’S A BUG THAT’S IT I’M OUT.” 

Or slugs, for that matter. This photo...

Was accompanied by the text, “INNAPROPRIATE SLUG SONGS.” (Photo by ‪Valeriy Kutsyna.) 

And posters were burned? 

(Photo again from Claire on Bluesky.)

Not sure I can get behind that. Even if if it was voluntary.

The conference ended when police showed up.

• • • • •

And that’s all for now! Thank you, as always, for your attention! 

Critique: Computing crocetin

This week's is courtesy of the extremely patient Dimitra Bezantakou. Dimitra was nice enough to say that she found the blog helpful as she was creating the poster below. Click to enlarge!

This is a common three column poster, but there are a few things that help set it apart.

Bolding key words and phrases in the introduction makes reading the text faster. The text has ample spacing, which also helps readability.

The methods are shown in a way that add some visual interest to the poster. There is a lot of text and anonymous graphs, so the blocks of colour were quite badly needed to stop the poster from being too monotone.

The title is the biggest thing on the poster. And while I am not excited about the logo to the left of the title, the subdued colour and size stop it from distracting from the title.

Wider margins might improve the look of the poster. As clean and orderly as the columns are, the space between the columns looks extremely tight. The graphs in the centre column are just too close to the text on either side. 

Here is a quick revision with the central graphics reduced to 95% of their original size:

This helps. Probably the same approach could be used to bring the text away from the edges of the page, which are also closer than readers might expect.

How to pitch a poster in lightning talk (ePosters blog guest post)

The good people at ePosters asked if I would write something for their blog, They asked nicely, so I said, “I’ve been meaning to write about flash talks where people pitch their posters. How about that?” They said, “Okay.” 👍 And now it’s done and up.

Please visit ePosters for “How to pitch your poster in a flashy lightning talk.”

I hope you enjoy!

Poster controversies

Over a year ago, I saved a few tweets about controversies that erupted over a couple of posters at a Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. At the time, I was aware that there was a lot of discussion on social media but didn’t have the bandwidth to follow it closely.

Today I went looking for summaries of the controversy, and found a couple, which I have linked below. I don’t pretend that these summaries are complete or perfect, but I think they give at least a hint of what happened.

Most conferences do minimal screening of conference posters. They also do not necessarily do great monitoring of what goes up on unused poster boards, or whether people post the work they originally submitted. Normally, these are harmless.

But I do think it is worth asking under what conditions posters should be removed by conference organizers. If an organization doesn’t have policies for that, they should make them, and make them public, rather than trying to react on the fly.

External links

The censorious Society for Personality and Social Psychology (13 February 2024)

SPSP censorship 2.0: “We are above the rules” (21 February 2024)

SPSP addresses convention poster concerns and outlines next steps (29 February 2024)

 

Critique: Posters have entered the chat

Some time ago, Greg Fell shared an interesting poster. (You may not be able to see it due to user settings.) I reached out to the creator, Anton Pottegård. He sent a slightly earlier version of this poster. Click to enlarge!

This poster does a couple of things. First, it draws inspiration from an existing design that people already understand. Second, it is memorable because it breaks from the conventional “journal article on a page” format. Others have used the text message style to create concert posters.

I don’t know exactly how this particular poster was created, but it is not hard to find websites that can emulate a chat.

What is not clear to me from this version is how someone is supposed to get the abstract mentioned at the bottom of the poster. I appreciate that the PDF icon looks like what you would see in a text message, but a short, easy to remember URL might have done the job, too.

Is this format appropriate to all posters? I don’t think so. This study has a simple result: “There’s no effect.” Many other projects are nowhere near as easy to summarize.

I am sure that some people will argue that this format is never appropriate for an academic poster, for two reasons. 

First, it refers to data but does not show those data. While I understand the reasoning behind the “I must be able to personally inspect every data point before I can be convinced,” I don’t think that level of intense scrutiny is at all necessary for a conference poster. Save it for journal articles. 

Second, there are no references. I am neutral on the subject, but forthcoming research shows that people think less of posters without at least one reference.

Bonus posters 

Anton wrote, “Overall, doing strong posters is very important to me!” He shared more that he created.

Here we have one that is very different in style from the one above:

While the first poster imitates the glossy interface that almost everyone has become familiar with, this second poster uses a hand drawn style. I like the style, but I worry that the summary in the top half is a little hard to read.

(The QR code at the bottom still works!)

And this is one of Anton’s favourites:

Same style as above, but the summary is shorter, larger, and more readable.

While this poster may have been on on Anton’s favoruites, I suspect it would not be everyone’s cup of tea. I personally wouldn’t make a poster that included someone on a toilet, but different strokes for different folks.

Pros: Memorable.

Cons: I don’t see that it as relevant to the content. If this was a paper about gastrointestinal function, I wouldn’t question it is much.

Related posts

Critique: Protein biosynthesis 

External links

Anton Pottegård home page

Sample posters by Anton