Link roundup for September 2013

This animation shows how to improve graphs, with many of the same lessons I talk about here for posters. Hat tip to Mike Taylor and Anna Sharman. I like it, but it goes just a bit too far in pursuing minimalism. It starts here:

 Here’s where I would have stopped:

But the author goes on...

If you’re going to write numbers instead of having a Y axis, you might as well just have a bulleted list:

• French fries 607
• Potato chips: 542
• Bacon: 533
• Pizza: 296
• Chili dog: 260

Do the bars start at zero? Is it a linear scale? Removing the Y-axis makes for too many possibilities for deceptive displays.

The animation above males an appearance in a good rant against infographics. Hat tip to Brian R. Pauw for this one.

90% of the infographics out there are baroque, non-selective compositions of facts.

Comic book letterer Todd Klein has created a “Compendium of calligraphic knowledge.” Beautiful, and with good lessons for conference posters, too! It’s a signed, 11 × 17" limited edition print of 300 copies. All for the price of $16 plus shipping. You can buy it here.

A Bit of Behavioural Ecology would like to remind you: Nobody cares about you. (Actually, they might, but they have a point about conference posters: nobody will be as engaged and fascinated with your work as you are.)

Tech In Translation has some musings on the differences between academic conferences and tech conferences.

Critique: Semiconductors

Today’s poster come from Josh Campbell, and is shared with his permission. Click to enlarge...

Portrait posters are always tricky, and this one has a nice clean two-column layout that leaves no confusion as to what you are to read in what order. Both Josh and I like how the dropped caps look in their boxes. Now, I am not a fan of boxes, but Josh did concede that I might have had a point about leaving off the logos.

I printed this on paper and tried the “arm’s length” test, which this poster passes, but only just by the skin of the teeth. The text is readable, but just barely. Bigger text would be very welcome here.

The text in the lower right box (beginning with “N”) comes too close to the edge of the box, particularly down in the lower left corner.

While we’re looking down at the bottom, another part of the poster that is a problem is inconsistent margins between the boxes. In particular, the bottom of the right column doesn’t line up with the bottom of the left column. Here’s a quick and dirty aligned version that doesn’t set off my alignment OCD as much:

Josh writes:

I needed a coloured background to show up my molecules so I tried to go for a neutral colour that also ties in with my university colours.

Unfortunately, the colour choice for the background is still a problem. The blue and the grey molecules are too close, and the molecules are getting lost at any sort of distance. The following quick and dirty colour replacement grates on the eye a bit:

I show this just to demonstrate that the pictures of molecular structure are much more readily visible against a lighter background. Those molecules are the whole point of the poster, and it would help if they were more visible than they are here.

Related posts

Is it big enough? The “arm’s length” test

The best picture will usually be the one you take yourself

“This is the best picture I was able to find on the Internet.”

There’s no sin in finding images on the Internet. I’m a big fan of Flickr and Google Images, too.

But I’ve seen people use crummy pictures from the Internet of scientific equipment that they use practically every day. And these are not difficult pieces of equipment to photograph because they are very large or very small. No, these are mundane objects that sit on a benchtop, like PCR machines.

I’ve seen people put up crummy pictures from the Internet of some other lab doing a procedure when it’s a procedure that they themselves do all the time.

You look witless and lazy when you say, “This is the best picture I could find on the Internet” if you could have taken a picture yourself.

High quality cameras are almost everywhere now. Even if you are one of the increasingly small number of people who does not have a smartphone, you probably know someone who does who would be happy to take the picture for you.

Crossposted from NeuroDojo.

Critique: Protein binding

This week’s poster was originally shown at ISMB/ECCB by Stephen J. Bush, who was kind enough to give his permission to share it with you! Click to enlarge...

Without a doubt, the most eye-catching aspect of this design is that central circle, with a dig-eared rectangle overlain on the top, straddling the two columns. It’s just a couple of steps shy of drawing a bullseye in the middle of the poster. You can’t help but look at it. If anything on this poster warrants further consideration, it’s that figure.

The benefit of this circle / polygon combo is that it draws your eye in. The downside is that it is not clear where the image belongs in the overall narrative. Is it an example for the Introduction? Or maybe the Results? The corner of the polygon almost forms an arrow pointing down to the Results. This might be a cue for the reader, but it’s so subtle that it’s hard to tell if that was deliberate or not. The central circle could even be part of the Methods, although the position doesn’t suggest that as strongly as the other two.

The typesetting around the circle is good on the left side, but the the numbered list on the right of the circle creates a little tension between the curve of the circle and the right angle created by the list.

Everything else is crisp and there is not a lot to pick at. It might benefit from one more pass to see if there was anything else to cut, but the poster does not seem to have large amounts of fluff.

The moral of the story is: When you have an element of a poster so powerful that it dominates everything else, you need to make sure it is doing exactly what you want it to do.

Related posts

The eye loves the circle

Link roundup for August 2013

Katie M. Everson has created The Scientist’s Guide to Poster Design. One resource there that you won’t find here is an tutorial for Adobe Indesign.

Also extremely good is this recorded webinar on poster design, modestly titled, “Poster Presentations that Rock!”

This month’s “run. don’t walk” link is to a compilation of Nature’s Points of View column. It is awesome. Hat tip to Biochem Belle for sending this my way. There are compiled columns about:

• Composition and layout
• Using color
• Elements of a figure
• Improving figure clarity
• Multidimensional data
• Data exploration

Here is a good set of conference-going tips from David Shiffman over at Southern Fried Science. Sarah Semmler has even more.

Meanwhile, Mark Rom calls conferences “lumbering dinosaurs”. It’s mainly a criticism of “panels” (what some conferences might call “symposia”) more than anything else. But poster sessions are mentioned:

Scholars Prefer Presentations, Not Posters

For conventional conferences, this is probably true. (It is, as I’ve documented a few times on this blog. - ZF.) To the extent this is true, it is probably due to the weight of tradition and the fact that authorities largely determine who gives papers and who gives posters (‘‘I’m sorry to inform you that your paper proposal was not accepted, but you may present at a poster session.’’) This perception is probably reinforced through cultural norms that give the signal that ‘‘real scholars’’ give panel presentations, while the posters are merely a sympathy prize for the less fortunate.

A summary of some of his points are at the College Guide blog.

This retrospective on how scientific papers have been typeset over the past 350 years is worth a peek for thinking about designing with text. Hat tip to Anna Sharman for this one.

Why do we need such big text on posters? Gary Foster nails it:

That's why all students are taught to use big fonts on posters. It's hard to read when tipsy ;-)

But big should not be the sole criteria for font choice (from What we should call grad school):

I Can Haz Cheeseburger is not to be outdone:

You might remember that I am a big fan of the TV show Samurai Jack. Fellow fans, rejoice! It’s coming back in comic form.

Mug shot

Should you put your picture on your poster?

I understand the theory. The theory is that by putting your picture on your poster, you make it easier for people to recognize and find you, particularly if the poster has been up for quite a while before the actual poster presentation time. Plus, people are naturally drawn to looking at faces.

I’ve never done this, and I’ve never been a fan of the idea. It always seemed to me to be a little contrived and overly eager. I’m skeptical that a picture works better than a name tag. Posters always have author lists, and attendees have name tags. In my experience, it is rare that there is confusion about whose poster it is.

If you want someone to be able to recognize your face, it can't be the size of a postage stamp on the poster. It would have to be fairly big. Poster real estate is limited and valuable. I am very much in favour of maximizing the work.

Similarly, if you wanted a picture to serve as a way to recognize you, probably the best place to put it is at the top of the poster. Then, you run into a lot of the same layout problems that you have with logos.

If you have collaborators, do you put all the pictures? If not, how will people know which name the photo is associated with?

Finally, not everyone takes a great picture every single time.

Hat tip to the webinar on conference posters, where this question came up.

External links

Poster presentations that rock

Passport photo from here.

Put down your tablet and phone

I was listening to a webinar on poster presentations, when the host mentioned how it was a big turn off when a poster presenter was “playing Angry Birds when someone is walking by.”

Part of the secret to getting people to stop by your poster is to look willing to engage with people. You can’t do that if:

• You’re looking at your phone or tablet for more than a few moments.
• You’re sitting on the floor reading or eating.
• You’re talking to someone else about something completely unrelated to your poster.

Now, there is a happy medium. You don’t want to appear disengaged, but desperation is not appealing, either. You don’t want to:

• Stare at people as they walk bye with pleading puppy dog eyes.
• Haul people off the conference floor.
• Launch into detailed explanations of your poster when nobody asked for it.

External links

Poster presentations that rock

Picture by ftrc on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.