07 June 2021

About that frontispiece...

I want to explain something about the frontispiece to the Better Posters book.

Presenter, Zen Faulkes, in front of a poster.

 The poster shown there is bad. 

Poster about shrimp motor neurons.

I’ve said as much in this blog post.

Poster of shrimp motor neurons with criticisms written on it.

So why, in a book about improving posters, is the very first one a reader is likely to lay eyes on, a bad example of the format?

I included that picture not because of the poster, but because of the presenter, which is to say me.

The picture is not a recent one, so I suppose some people might think I picked it because of ego: that I wanted to show myself younger than I am today. (Maybe there is a little of that. I do like how I look in that picture! And it’s got a favourite nerdy T-shirt that I don’t have any more.)

But I chose that picture as the frontispiece because that photo captured how I feel in a poster session. Happy, excited but not tense, and just... in my element. (And was even before I started blogging about conference posters!)

For many people, presenting posters is not a happy experience. For one reason or another, hey are stressed, they are tense, they are frowning. 

I chose that photo because it shows the feeling I want anyone to have during a poster session. It’s the enthusiasm for the poster session that I wanted to share in the book.

Related posts

Critique and makeover: Shrimp MoGs (rhymes with “rogues”)


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