Let’s see if I can get back into a regular rhythm of posting these!
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There continues to be a small group working on creating posters by computing methods.
(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
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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.
- Box backgrounds adjust for titles.
- Borders can be easily resized; the curves don’t change with rescaling.
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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.
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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
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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
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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.)
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?
Not sure I can get behind that. Even if if it was voluntary.
The conference ended when police showed up.
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And that’s all for now! Thank you, as always, for your attention!
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