I bring this up here because there will be sessions on conference accessibility that I had a small role in planning. Part of those sessions will be talking about how we can make the poster session experience better for people with accessibility needs.
The conference agenda is available. Look for “Making Meetings Better for All” for a brief description of this session.
Today’s contribution is from Alexandra Millhuff. Click to enlarge!
This poster combines a few elements of the billboard style with a more common three column layout. It’s certainly better than many of its competitors, with more graphics and fewer words. But I think there is room to push it even further in readability and focusing attention.
First, I wanted to clear up the title bar.
The logo on the left was causing two problems. First, it drew attention away from the title, because it was in the critical top left corner, where experienced readers of English naturally look first. It grabs even more attention because of the high contrast white box and red letters.
The other problem was that although the title and authors are aligned to the centre of their text box, they aren’t centrally aligned with the page overall. It’s been pushed to the right to make space for the logo on the left. This destroys the symmetry that you want in centre aligned text.
I moved the title and authors to the right. I found an all white version of the university logo that got rid of the box and matched the rest of the title bar. The logo is a little smaller, which allowed me to put all of the author info on one line. This creates a little more white space, which helps make the title the focus of the title bar.
Next, I cleaned up the columns.
I got rid of bullets because they were adding visual clutter. Unless your text is an actual list in a longer section of text, you are better off without bullets.
There were two alignment issues. Some of the text boxes in the columns on the left and right didn’t align. Here is a close up of the left column, with a vertical line drawn down the page. Notice how the bullets are just to the right of the line in the top text box, sit on the line in the middle box, and are to the left of the line in the bottom box.
When you create a text box in PowerPoint, it adds white
space around the text by default. This doesn’t matter if you only have
text lining up with text. But if you want text to line up next to
anything else, the text will be misaligned with other objects. Click to
enlarge!
Here
is how you fix that problem in PowerPoint. You have to manually change
the margins to zero. Under “Shape format,” expand the sidebar. Fine the
“Text options” tab and set the margins to zero.
The result of those changes:
Next, I moved the main graphic from the middle to the right. This is one of those decisions that I think some people might disagree with. They might argue that these are results, and so the logical place to put them is after the “Study design” section in the left-hand column.
It is true that the graphic show results, but in practice on this poster, it is acting more as a summary for the project. I say this because it has a big sentence at the top – set in even large point size than the title! And there is no “Results” heading above the graphic.
The problem with a placing a big summary graphic in the middle is that it breaks the reading flow. By moving it to the left, it emphasizes that this is the big take-home message. The title and this graphic clearly get signalled as the most important things on the poster.
Next, , I did some more text editing and repositioning. I aligned the take-home sentence above the infographic with the title. I edited the text throughout to make it shorter, and adjusted the position of the text boxes accordingly. These edits included the the message above the graphic, but that will change again...
I continued to look for places to make cuts.
I made another possibly controversial decision: I got rid of the references. The reason for cutting it out was that the references weren’t referenced. That is, there was no place in the main text they were mentioned. They were functioning more like a “For further reading” suggestion than citations.
I noted
that in the graphic, every factor shown had a p value underneath
it. And they were all exactly the same p value! Rather than saying the same p value seven times, I cut those and noted the p values in a sentence underneath the graphic.
Lastly, I made some more adjustments to the central graphic. I tried to make the circles more evenly spaced.
Also, I reworded the top take home message. I realized “older women” was inaccurate, because there were two separate risk factors. I had tried to condense too much.
I ran this last version past Alexandra to confirm that my various edits to the text hadn't changed the meaning from what she intended.
Here’s the changes in a movie:
Books have ISBN. Articles have DOI. Authors have ORCID. Institutions have ROR. Until recently, conferences or events had nothing. But that started changing in the last couple of years (Franken et al. 2022).
The idea of serial numbers, or persistent identifiers (PIDs) as they are more commonly called today, is one of those boring but so useful bits of scientific infrastructure. They enable so much data collection that you can get a much clearer picture of trends in fields.
There is now a working identifier for events and conferences called ConfIDent. (Conference IDentification, I see what you did there. Well done, punsters.)
As someone who has been actively campaigning for people to take conference posters more seriously, I think this is an important step. I hope that with this sort of identifier, we could eventually start to answer questions like, how many posters and slide talks are given at conferences every year? How many works are eventually published in journals or elsewhere?
For individual posters, a DOI is the more appropriate identifier. If organizers don’t create DOIs for your poster, you can generate one by uploading your poster on services like Figshare or Zenodo.
If you are a conference organizer, I encourage you to give your next conference an identifier. Broadcast that to your members and tell them what it is and how to use it.
If you are a conference attendee, I encourage you to ask the organizers for the ConfIDent number of the event, share this blog post if they have no clue what that means, and list the ConfIDent number of events you attend in your CV.
Hat tip to Alice Meadows of MoreBrains for pointers here.
Franken J, Birukou A, Eckert K, Fahl W, Hauschke C, Lange C. 2022. Persistent identification for conferences. Data Science Journal 21(1): 11. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011
ConfIDent platform (see especially FAQ on requesting a conference ID)
ConfIDent about PIDs: Using DataCite DOIs for Conferences (blog post)
ConfIDent project (completed 2022)
Being Canadian, of course I played and watched hockey, although in my case, it was extremely casual and not something I actively followed. But I’ve been watching the creation of the PWHL with interest. The league’s first season did something unusual: none of the teams had names. They were just called by the name of their city or state.
But a few weeks ago, we finally got team names! Here’s a look at the six team logos:
The graphic designers did a bang-up job, I think. And because this is the poster blog, there is a lesson I would like poster makers to think about.
Almost every team sport has numbers on the back of their shirts, tops, jerseys, guernseys, whatever they happen to be called in that particular sport. The PWHL jerseys have them too:
But I have never seen any other league do what the PWHL has done with their jerseys. Every number has a series of small icons running through them. This is the Toronto Sceptres’ jersey:
From a distance, it might look like a raindrop, but it’s an orb (I’ve seen it called the “orb of unity”) that has been pulled from the team logo. You can see the orb better in this close-up of the top of the team logo:
The player numbers for the Boston Fleet get waves, Montréal Victoire players get fleur-de-lis, and so on.
I love this. I love details that reward anyone who takes a slightly closer than usual look. Designers have a phrase for this: “surprise and delight.” If you search “design surprise delight,” you can find many essays about it importance.
Here’s an example of one such detail that appeared in the blog before: a detail hidden in a QR code. QR codes are a great place to put such details, because the code is deliberately quite robust: it can degrade quite a bit and still work.
Other places that you could put in some sort of detail?
Many people use section headings on their poster that follow the journal “IMRAD” format. The headings are often simple boxes of solid colour with one word in them. There is almost always some space for a little detail or two.
While I dislike bullets on posters in general, if you do have cause to use one, you could try some small icon (like the orb above!) instead of a true bullet.
I think there might also be some possibilities to try to take elements of a university logo and put them somewhere else in the poster besides the title bar.
But a skeptical reader might ask: “What’s in it for me?”
How does this help you, a conference presenter? Isn’t a detail, by definition, something that will get overlooked by most people? How will it help you get one more visitor at your poster?
The honest answer is: it might not help you get one more visitor at your poster. This isn’t a technique to get more people. It’s a technique to give those who do stop at your poster a an extra little reward, and one hopes, a better and more memorable experience.
Think of it this way: people at a research conference are inundated with information. They are going to be living in their heads for a few days during the meeting. There
may not be all that many opportunities for them to smile at a little
detail they spot on a poster. You’re giving your viewer a chance to have an emotion, and emotion is core to social connections. And social connections are the basis for professional connections.
Critique: Italian cemeteries
Analyzing the Vaquero logo, or: Who was that tanned man?
In big convention centers, it’s not unusual to find an interloper. Ben Filio wrote:
You’ve heard of presenting your research to a general audience now get ready for… pigeon #sfn2024
Little did he know.
Thanks to Billy Wade, an undergraduate with Dr. Stephanie Grella at Loyola Chicago. Thank you, Billy, for giving us something to smile about!
Jake Wintermute shared this image, and wrote:
(T)his image makes me want to go to a conference where people exchange tiny posters with QR codes on the back to the full poster
While this might not be a viable conference format, I do think this could be a great networking tool. Most people make handouts the size of standard letter page. That’s still not very portable. Something like this – a bit bigger than a business card – is far more easily stashed in a purse, wallet, or pocket.
If you give it out before your poster session, it might be better than a business card because you are providing the potential viewer with a visual cue that will make it easier to remember as they walk through the aisles of the session.
I love papercraft on posters, and Caroline O’Donnell has used it cleverly on her poster.
While I have a still photo in this post, you probably should see the video on LinkedIn to get the full effect of this poster. (You can also watch the video on Twitter.)
People are always trying to find ways to get more data in a a posters limited space. By creating a spinning section, Caroline effective gets four graphs for the price of one – but without shrinking them to a quarter of the size!
Hat tip to Milton Tan!
Caroline O’Donnell on LinkedIn
Out now from Pelagic Publishing and fine bookstores.
Pelagic Publishing page for Better Posters
Bookshop.org page for Better Posters (hub for local retailers)
Amazon page for Better Posters
Chapters page for Better Posters
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