Link roundup, August 2012

Certain styles of movie posters get used again and again (English summary here).

Speaking of limitations, Laura Bergells (a.k.a. Maniactive) has an exercise in slide design that’s worth trying with your conference poster:

(N)otice what happens when you start from a place of restriction and gradually open yourself up to a few new features. You’ll start to see what’s really essential — and what might be distracting.

X-Gal at Journal of Cell Science dispenses conference advice, including some good thoughts on the poster session:

With the current trend of playing your cards close to your chest, you're unlikely to hear much new on the podium – it’s the posters where most of the valuable information can be extracted. Even if the author hasn’t dared to print the fine details, you can often coax things out of them with a friendly chat. I once went to spy on a competitor’s work, terrified that I was about to be scooped, only to end up agreeing to a collaboration that turned out to be unexpectedly productive. But that never would have happened if we hadn’t had that excuse to meet in person and discuss our common ground.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: stuff gets done at poster sessions.

The Scholarly Kitchen looks at the relationship between typefaces and authority.

Designing communications for a poster fair is a few years old, but has some good advice, much of which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog.

I’ve seen variations of this idea on a few sites, but this is a particularly well done example. If movies had crappy fonts:


I’ve seen variations of making pictures using type before, but this one is particularly fun, because it uses superheroes.

We go into the archives from 1997 for how to give a poster nobody remembers. Hat tip to Bastian Greshake.