Link round-up for March 2021

The Perseverance rover team hid a message in the rover’s parachute. You can encode a message at Encode Mighty Things website. Here’s one I did:

 

I’ll save you the stress of trying to decode it. It’s just an ad for the Better Posters book. 

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Animate Your Science has some advice on picking typefaces for posters. I agree with most of their advice, except this: 

 

Every time a scientist uses Comic Sans a graphic designer dies
BUT there is one exception. That is if your poster IS a comic!
If that’s the case, go for it! In this context Comic Sans is perfect and it would almost be a crime not to use it.

Emphatic no here. Using Comic Sans in a comic style is actually worse than in a non-comic style. Because people know what comics should look like, and they know they have never read a comic that was set in Comic Sans.

 

Compare some superheroic phrases in professional comics typefaces and Comic Sans. 

 

 

It’s painful to see the life leeched out of the words when they appear in Comic Sans.

 

I love handwritten fonts and comic book fonts. If you want to do them, do it right and get a font that pros use.

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Super Plots of Data is a nice web tool for making distribution plots. There gave you some sample data that shows its features:

There is a technical paper about this here.