Critique: Sand crab summer

Some projects show up as posters at conferences, and then are neatly converted and are published as journal papers soon after. My newest paper (Faulkes 2017)... did not happen that way. The bulk of the paper never got presented at a conference.

I featured bits and pieces of my new paper on an Ecological Society of America poster, way back in 2012. I wasn’t even there for that meeting; I had my co-author put it up. Now that I have some distance between that meeting, it’s a good time to review how it’s held up. Click to enlarge!

 
This was a big poster; seven and a half feet wide!

The graphs in this paper shows up as Figure 4 in Faulkes (2017). But one bit, the crab at the bottom of the third column, made it into a separate paper earlier (Faulkes 2014). Looking back, that picture was a bad choice. One thing I think I still like is the repetition in the four central columns: they all have a map above and a graph below, and a little explanatory text underneath. The picture in the third column breaks the pattern. Not sure if I should have tried to include it at all.

It was also dumb of me to put the photo on the right column underneath a block of text, instead of aligning it along the top with all the other images. All of the images along the top should have been the same width.

The poster is mostly grey, because the sand crabs were grey, and the maps I made were mostly grey. When you enlarge, you can see dots on the map are in brighter, saturated colours. I might have made those dots even bigger.

Although I never presented most of the data at a conference, I did use it in an example I did for a #SciFund poster class in 2016. When I do that class, I always make a poster at the same time as the students, so I am working alongside them and facing the same struggles they are. (Here’s a poster from an earlier #SciFund class.)

When I was teaching this class, I had just come back from the Evolution meeting where I had seen what has now become the most popular poster ever on this blog. I was very influenced by it and wanted to make something similarly big and simple. I’m happier with this poster today than the one above. Click to enlarge!

I still like the approach of making the picture of the animals big to act as an entry point to the poster, and staying very focused on a small number of graphs.

I’m not convinced I found the right colour palette, or typeface. The brown was lifted from the colour of the beach they are found in. The font was Sitka, which I had blogged about as being highly readable.

I made this poster in Inkscape. I struggled a lot with Inkscape. I know now that some of the things I complained about were not fair comments about the software. I was working with new software and didn’t know how to do certain things. Some of the walls I ran into were the limits of my knowledge, not of the program.

I did learn how to “export” in Inkscape, though. I managed to keep a bit better track of the “making of” than usual. Watch the poster take shape in this animation!

You can see that the big changes happen early, as I make decisions about the layout. After that, it’s mostly a lot of tweaking. Moving here, changing the colour there, rewording the text. Trifles make perfection. I may not have reached perfection here, but the degree I got close to it was due to the trifling I did.

Related posts

A poster with no conference, or: What I made in that #SciFund poster class
Critique: Anther colours
No more slidesters, part 7: Inkscape

References

Faulkes Z. 2014. A new southern record for a sand crab, Lepidopa websteri Benedict, 1903 (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Crustaceana 87(7): 881-885. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685403-00003326

Faulkes Z. 2017. The phenology of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae). Journal of Coastal Research 33(5): 1095-1101. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-16-00125.1