Link round-up for December 2020

Dave Rubenson explores the differences between a presentation and a journal article. Much of the advice applies to posters, except moreso.

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Robert Hurt, an illustrator from Caltech with many Nature covers to his credit, talks about the levels of illusion in scientific illustrations in this interview from The Science Show.

One of the criticisms I've occasionally heard levied about the kind of artwork we do for exoplanets is that they look so real, people might not understand that that's not an actual photo of the planet.... 

But there is this question of if you make the artwork not as compelling, given that you can just walk into the theatre and see three different movies that are all taking you to really awesome looking worlds, do you go ahead and try to match that level of enthusiasm and do something very realistic that pulls people in, with the fear of being too realistic and maybe people walk away with a misconception that we've actually visited these places, versus maybe doing something less compelling but then it maybe won't suck people into the story.

 

There’s another interview with him here.

 

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 Looking for a concise summary of your work for your poster title? Try TLDR. 

Jeffrey Perkel and Richard van Noorden wrote a news feature about this work. The technical paper is available here. 

It tried the abstract, introduction, and conclusion of one of my papers. The result, alas, didn’t even scan.

Lepidopa benedicti from South Padre Island, Texas, on the western coast of Gulf of Mexico acts as a population sink.

Sigh. A species cannot be a population sink. Clearly a work in progress. But promising!

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The site’s creator has been talking trash about public health. Not cool, Nate. But he is not the only one creating content on the website, so it’s worth a peak to look at the end of year round-up of Fivethirtyeight’s weirdest and best charts of 2020. I like this one showing how boring gridiron (also known as American football) truly is.

The little red lines are when the ball is in play.

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An end of year round-up of data visualizations. This is a lengthy “meta-round-up.” That is, it’s a list of lists. Will take a while to work through these. You were warned. But if you have the time, there are some fine insights in there.

Hat tip to Melissa Vaught. 

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Good bye, 2020! Let’s hope that 2021 brings much more joy than just the publication of the Better Posters book!

Season’s greetings for 2020

Nope. Nothing poster related today. I’m gathering steam for January, when I hope to be blogging a lot in preparation for the release of the Better Posters book.

Meanwhile...

Peace on Earth.

Good will to all.

(I hope Roy Thomas, Ross Andru, and Mike Espositio don’t mind that I changed Johnny Storm’s message just a little tiny bit.)

Make the punctuation in your poster titles smaller

 

The occasional MyFonts email newsletter gave me a tip I didn’t know before. 

When you have large type, punctuation marks usually look too big. If your font is bigger than 24 points, they recommend setting punctuation points a few points smaller. 

Obviously, this applies most to titles on posters, which are (or should be!) huge.

Also remember that large type sizes often look better when the letters are spread out a little more than in book size.

External links

Fine points of designs

Sports graphics, or: A moment of American football

Alex Flores recommended this video on every NFL score ever. It’s good that he recommended it, because as a huge anti-fan of American football, I never would have stumbled across it myself.

If you don’t want to watch the video, you can get a sense of what it’s about in written form here. 

What this does a good job of pointing out is the utter numerical weirdness of American football. Whereas most games have single points, American football doesn’t. Which means scores are strangely distributed. And this makes for some interesting statistical exercises. 

And this got me thinking about how sports graphics could be a useful source of inspiration for posters. Different games have develop different representations of play. For example, here’s a live score (or “score worm” from an Australian rules football game:

Tennis serve placements show a fairly simple spatial representation.

 

Cricket has “wagon wheels.”

It wouldn’t surprise me if sports stats graphics are often better than scientific graphics, because there is money in sports. People wouldn’t bat an eye over hiring someone just to do graphics. And the types of stats for a given sport get sort of standardized (RBIs in baseball, kicking accuracy in AFL, run rate in cricket).

Now I want to interview someone who does these sorts of thing professionally.

External links

Chart Part: Scorigami, or the story of every NFL final score that has ever happened

Salmon slammin’

Felix Bernoully responded to my request for scientific graphics with a cartoon that was used in a press release. The first author of the paper drafted a single-panel cartoon using material from OpenClipArt and sent it to Felix:

 

This was accompanied by this caption:

Angular gyrus as part of the semantic processing area in human parietal cortex supports the comprehension of incomplete acoustic speech input in conditions in which the context allows for strong predictions regarding the incomplete word. An angling person on a Canadian river is thus much more likely to angle salmon than anything else (e.g. a shoe).

Felix had one afternoon to turn this into a more refined graphic. In two languages, no less! He wrote:

I've always been particular to the silliness of old woodcuts and wood engravings taken out of context (cf. Lucas & Morrow: What a Life! (1911)), so I decided that was the way to go.

Finding appropriate source material, preferably in the public domain, is a mix of Google-Fu (filter an image search by colour and usage rights) and rummaging through a number of sites bookmarked (e.g., The British Library at Flickr, The New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and of course Wikimedia Commons). 

The text is set in Caslon Antique, my go-to “olde-tymey” typeface (actually a late-19th-century re-invention of well worn 15th-century movable type).

The composition was done in Photoshop, at 2,048 px width. This is a bit bigger than what is needed for the screen, but will print well at up to 20 cm (8 in) width, should the need arise.

The end result in the English version.

And this is the German version:

The German version is a little different than the English version in more than just the words.

The translation of the English cue – salmon – is “Lachs” in German, so all the other predictions the brain would be discarding because of context (angling in Canada) had to start with “La...”. Thus: Lastwagen (lorry), Lampion (paper lantern), Lasso (lasso), and Laterne (street lantern). In English "salmon" led to: saw, samovar, saxophone, and safe.

Felix notes using crosshatched illustrations has some technical considerations about resolution.

It’s always good to include a little buffer when working on pixel based images. I normally recommend about 1.5 to double the intended size as a buffer, and, of course, to use vector elements wherever possible.

The cross hatching of woodcuts and wood engravings makes them very difficult to vectorise. You’ll likely end up with insanely huge and complex files that may choke many a vector editing or PDF rendering app. So in this particular case, high-resolution grayscale (or 1-bit) bitmap images are much easier to handle.

While this particular graphic might be a little too condensed to serve as a stand alone conference poster, I could certainly see this as being a main element in a poster.

Reference

Scharinger M, Bendixen A, Herrmann B, Henry MJ, Mildner T, Obleser J. 2015. Predictions interact with missing sensory evidence in semantic processing areas. Human Brain Mapping 37(2): 704-716. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.23060

Link roundup for November 2020

One of the advantages of an online conference is that you can more readily measure what is working and what is not. Clicks, attendance, and visits are easily measured. Lucas Braun does some analysis of an online poster session:

Poster session turnout at @cshlmeetings From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems online conference (#NAISys on Twitter) seems to be bleak. Only ~18% of the dedicated slack channels had more than one message, and only ~55% had more than one external member. How can we do better online poster sessions?

It’s worth remembering that almost half of poster presenters in the long ago days of face-to-face conferences have given at least one poster where nobody talked to them.

I am hoping some organizers from other conferences would be willing to share their data!

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Amy Cheu has a free PowerPoint deck about designing presentations.

Lots of good reminders in a compact space!

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The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, like many conferences, is going online for its next meeting. It has created a short “tip sheet” for its online posters here. The poster material is on page 2 of the PDF.

The examples they use are pretty good, although they all have too many damn boxes!

Warning! Contains this blog.

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Everyone’s got a chart they want gone. Nick Desbarats says were probably should stop using slope charts. Graphs that look like this:

 

This take-home message applies to all graphs (emphasis in original):

(T)he risk isn’t that readers will miss out on important insights, it’s that they’ll get completely wrong insights, which is obviously a much bigger problem.

Hat tip to Boris Gorelick.

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A poster presentation should be short. It should also be an opportunity for dialogue. I like this article by Mark Goulston about how to stop yourself from talking too much. 

I think this paragraph might resonate with a few people in poster sessions:

One reason some people are long-winded is because they’re trying to impress their conversational counterpart with how smart they are, often because they don’t actually feel that way underneath. If this is the case for you, realize that continuing to talk will only cause the other person to be less impressed.

Hat tip to Viola Nawrocka.

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Thoughtful Twitter thread about American election maps by César Hidalgo. He discusses that “visualizations are metaphors,” and he hits on a problem that has been bugging me about maps that try to minimize the “all or nothing” effect of by using purple:

Comparing shades of purple is nearly impossible.

Hat tip to Emily Rollinson.

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To my surprise, César does not mention the election map from Le Monde, which won a lot of praise on Twitter.

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And one more analysis of  American election data by cartographers. There is much more than election maps, though:

The Washington Post tried making bar charts (showing the votes that have been counted so far) supplemented by a blurry zone to the right of the bar... Perhaps this “Fuzzy Bar” would be the famous viz to come out of this year?

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I should really stop putting out every primer from MyFonts. But they’re so good. This one about using gray is no exception (PDF).

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Three online courses for scientific illustration.

1. Introduction to Organic 3D Modelling: 11-22 January 2021.
2. Naturalistic and Scientific Illustration 1: Traditional Techniques: 25-29 January 2021.
3. Naturalistic and Scientific Illustration 2: Digital techniques, 1-3 February 2021.

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Acdamics are cheap and always resisting paying for professional graphics software. This answer on Quora examines the difference between Adobe Photoshop and its free alternative, GNU image processing. 

Photoshop is a bit like an iceberg—what you see above the surface is only a small percentage of what’s there. You’ll find little symbols and hidden features in almost every Photoshop dialog that hide functionality most users don’t know about.

You can debate whether all that extra stuff is stuff you “need” as a poster maker for a conference. But at least be aware that the differences in the products are real.

Better Posters available from major bookstores Amazon, BN, Indigo, more!

Y’all.

The Better Posters book is up on Amazon!

And Barnes & Noble! 

And for my fellow Canadiana, on Indigo!

And ready for pre-order! 

(These are not endorsements. Other bookstores are available and I love them all and hope you support the bookstore you love most. I love local bookstores, not everyone has a local bookstore.)

I haven’t been checking, so I don’t know when this went up. But it’s here now! 

I would be ecstatic if you would pre-order this book. Pre-orders mean a lot to a new book in terms of getting exposure, shelf space, and more.

I guess I better check those page proofs and fix those figures like I’m supposed to. I mean, it’s on bookstores so I guess it’s real!

External links

Bookshop.org (local booksellers) https://bookshop.org/books/better-posters-plan-design-and-present-an-academic-poster/9781784272357
Indigo https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/better-posters-plan-design-and/9781784272357-item.html
Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/better-posters-zen-faulkes/1137705604
Amazon US https://www.amazon.com/dp/1784272353
Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Better-Posters-design-present-academic/dp/1784272353/ 
Amazon Australia https://www.amazon.com.au/Better-Posters-Design-Present-Academic/dp/1784272353/ 
Dymocks (Australia) https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/better-posters-by-zen-faulkes-9781784272357