Deck the halls with conference posters, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-laaaaa...

Doctor Becca reckons this is the best re-use of a conference poster ever, and I’m inclined to agree. So do many other people! I bugged Becca for the instructions, and she came through like a trooper:

Here’s how:

1. Cut your poster into six equal-sized squares. You may have some extra bits, but it’s no biggie.
2. Take one square, fold it into a triangle, and then again into a smaller triangle.
3. Hold the triangle so that the fully folded side is on the bottom and the longest side is on the right.
4. Cut four lines parallel to the longest side (cuts shown in blue) – make sure you don’t cut all the way to the left side, just cut so that there are four strips hanging off of the left side.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Open up the square – it should look like this:
   
   
   
   
   
6. Take the two innermost flaps and overlap them so they make a hollow tube. Tape them together.
7. Flip the paper over to the other side, take the 2nd inner two flaps, overlap them slightly, and tape.
8. Keep flipping, overlapping and taping until finished. Turn it on its side, and it will look like this:
   
   
   
   
   
9. 1/6^th of the snowflake is done!
10. Do this with the other five squares.
11. Once all your snowflake portions are made, arrange so that they’re in a nice snowflake configuration. Staple everything together in the middle, as well as the outer “x’s” so they’re not all floppy.
12. Voila! Winter Wonderland!

Season’s greetings!

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Original post

Push pins : posters

Here’s another piece of information that might help conference organizers plan their poster sessions: How many pins do you need? Here’s how they do it at one of the biggest scientific conferences in the world:

I received an email from the Society for Neuroscience this week describing the wrap up of the last conference. It included this tidbit:

• 110,000 push pins ordered to hold 15,116 poster presentations

This works out to 7.277 tacks per poster. An extravagance! You just need one tack for each corner, people!

But wait! There were eight poster sessions (two each, Sunday through Wednesday). Morning presenters could leave tacks for the afternoon presenters, who could leave tacks for the next day.

This means you effectively had 58.2 pins for each poster space.

That’s enough pins not just to attach your poster to the board, but to ensure it would not be cast adrift from its moorings should a small squall suddenly whip up in the middle of the convention center.

Related posts

• No tacks
• Posterface

Photo by Nrbelex on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Fade out

Earlier this year, I described my experience with printing one of my posters on fabric. After going the conference and presenting the poster, I brought it back and stuck it up in the hallway by my lab, as people often do with their posters.

I was surprised to watch the poster faded into near illegibility over the course of only a few months!

Here’s a picture from shortly after receiving the poster:

And here it is after a few months.

And just for the ultra-detailed comparison, here’s the original source of this picture.

Here’s how my name looked on the poster when I first checked it:

And here’s how it looks after some time in the hallway.

Fading was noticeable after about two months in the hall, I think. This poster is not in direct sunlight, though there is a hall light more or less right above it. Still, another poster right next to it has held its colour much better, and it’s over a year old.

If you print a fabric poster for a conference, keep the original files in case you want to reprint your poster.

Related post

Cut from whole cloth

Grids on grids

You can’t go too far wrong with a three column grid on a poster.

If it’s very wide poster, 5 or 7 or some other odd number of columns might be appropriate. But I will admit, a straight three column grid can all get just a little... rectangular.

Here’s a trick I learned from the Babylonians. The Babylonians are the ones we have to blame for our twelve hour days. The Babylonians like counting in twelves, rather than ten. Ten can be halved... or divided into five. Twelve can be divided into two, or three, or four, or six. Much more practical.

Create a grid that can be divided in lots of different ways. Or, to think of it another way, create a primary grid (three columns) and lay a secondary grid on top of that. Here, a two column grid superimposed on each main column. That is, six columns total.

Now you’re still following a grid, but you have more options for placement, and you can create a little more visual interest without sacrificing a disciplined layout.

You see this technique from time to time in journal articles, which might have a two column text layout, but will occasionally throw in a figure that is two-thirds of a page wide.

Better to make a complicated grid than abandoning a grid.

Bleeding ink

A poster is designed with pixels and light, but a poster is made of paper and ink.

It’s easy to forget the differences between the two.

At one conference I was at this year, some of the posters that “popped” used white text on a black background. They tended to have one drawback, though: the text was just a little too thin. It needed to be just a hair thicker.

When you print black text on a white background, the text is going to look ever so slightly larger.

When you print white text on a black background, the text is going to get ever so slightly smaller.

Ink always bleeds into paper. Even with high quality paper and a good printer, it will spread out from where it is placed. The finer the lines, the smaller the text, the more the ink spread comes into play. Failing to take that into account has frustrated type designers trying to capture the feel of classic typefaces.

On a computer screen, putting black text on white background is literally just the inverse of white text on a black background. But white letters emit light, so that if anything, a white letter on a black background will look more luminous on a screen, when ink spread will have the opposite effect when you print the poster.

This is why, as I discussed last time, you would want to have a wide variety of typefaces in your arsenal. For instance, here are some samples of a type called Sense. It comes in seven different weights, and each of those has a corresponding italic version (not shown here):

For a poster, you may want to step up from a regular weight to a medium, particularly if you want to use light text on a dark coloured background.

The other solution, of course, is to make everything on your poster bigger!

“me” picture by mightypeesh on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Ninja type: Finding the right weapon

Pamela Wilson has a great guest post at IttyBiz about typography, called, “How to Become a Typography Ninja in Five Easy Steps.”

One day, I must learn the art of making snappy titles...

I want to elaborate on one of the recommendations:

(T)he typeface you choose should include regular or book; italic; bold; bold italic at the very least.

If you are working with just the fonts that came with your computer, you are probably getting a very limited set of weights. Sometimes, you don’t get a “book” weight. People will sometimes say, “Oh, that type is no good for text blocks,” but they haven’t seen all the variations of the type.

My computer comes with five versions of Gill Sans, for instance. You don’t have to go far to find that packages that contain over 20 versions of Gill Sans.

For posters, a wider range of type weights than those can be valuable. You might not need 20 versions of the same typeface, but you might need more than “regular.” I’ll talk about why next time. And, to return to the ninja theme, it has to do with bleeding.

Picture by simonella_virus on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Posterface

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is on of the biggest, most massive exhibitions of conference posters in the world. And this year, neuroscientists at the University of California San Diego decided to pay tribute to this with the release of a music video of the song Posterface by singing sensation, Lady GaBa.

A background in neuroscience is probably helpful to understanding some of the lyrics. But dang, those spiking neurons look so utterly at home in a music video that I’m surprised that they haven’t been used before.

But lest you think this is just recreation by some labbies who’ve dipped into their pharmacological sample, the UCSD team has also put up a web application whereby you can search for posters, upload pictures of posters, and rate them.

Meanwhile, it is encouraging to hear from the SfN floor that there is still so much room to grow this blogging project.  

There are still a lot of horrific posters out there.

And speaking of the cane toad of typefaces...