Cell Bio 2023

How it started:

How it’s going:

Second photo from https://x.com/lenakumba/status/1731423282228867322

Record your presentation and listen to yourself

I’ve been fortunate that in the last couple of years, I was invited to do some podcasts. I listened back to each of them afterwards.

Yup, it was not fun. I became more aware of some of my speech patterns. Some I knew. Tendency towards tangents: check! But some were new. I would often pause in mid-sentence while I tried to work out how to end the sentence. I didn’t know I did that before.

You might not be able to get yourself invited to a podcast, but you probably have a smart phone, and it probably has an app like “Voice memos” or something similar.

So before you present your poster at the conference, turn on the voice recorder while you are talking through your poster. Give that 3-4 minute summary out loud while you are looking at your poster.

I know, I know. Few people like to hear the sound of their own voice played back to them. It sounds weird and unfamiliar, even though you know it’s what you just said.

But in a noisy environment where people only want to spend a few minutes with you at your poster, you want to deliver a crisp walk through if you’re asked.

Link roundup for October 2023

“What do you think of German coffee?”

This question is a great conversation starter at German conferences, writes Vicky Howe. Vicky wrote a blog post describing her recent poster, which moves away from the “wall of text” to an engaging flowchart. (See right; bet appreciated if you click to enlarge!)

On her social, Vicky wrote: 

I finally realised, a poster should be about starting conversations, not just showing results.

I appreciate this post because it epitomizes something I’ve been saying (and write in bold in Better Posters book): “Whoever starts the most conversations, wins.”

 • • • • •

A book on basic and clinical research that weighs in around 800 pages devotes just five to poster presentations, that is, well under one percent.

Gokulakrishnan K, Srikumar BN. 2023. Poster presentation at scientific meetings. In: Jagadeesh G, Balakumar P, Senatore F, eds. The Quintessence of Basic and Clinical Research and Scientific Publishing, pp. 785-790. Springer Nature Singapore. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-1284-1_49

• • • • •

New paper on judging posters has some interesting data. For instance: What do judges of conference posters judge hardest?

Judges were more critical of the presenters ability to answer questions (than poster design or presentation).

Another interesting feature, though There is some correlation between poster design and someone’s ability to present it well, but the scatter is large.

If you want to win a poster competition, you should definitely check out:

Patience GS, Villasana Y, Blais B. Perspectives on judging posters. The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering: in press. https://doi.org/10.1002/cjce.25109

• • • • •

And that’s the roundup for this month of Northern Hemisphere autumn!

Critique and makeover: I love that word, “Reform!”

In my new job as Program Director of DORA, I didn’t think that I would have many opportunities to scratch my itch for poster making. 

I was delighted when one of our colleagues, Alex Rushforth, said he was presenting a poster at the International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI) conference in Leiden last week. It’s an early look at DORA’s next major project, Reformscape.

This is what he emailed (click to enlarge):

Alex admitted that he didn’t have a great artistic eye, and invited other members of the Reformscape team to help out. Little did he know that one of the members on the team had literally written a book on the subject of conference posters!

It was very clear what Alex was trying to do. He had tried to lay out a straight forward two column poster in portrait orientation. The problems were simple but easy to solve: the boxes weren’t aligned, the rounded corners were awkward next to the rectangular graphics, the title didn’t pop, and the colours were not working.

And I... perhaps got a little carried away.

 

In very short order, this is what I emailed back to the Reformscape team.

Being consistent

What made this a quick revision was that I had been working on a style guide for DORA and Reformscape. A style guide is just a document that spells out common visual elements like colour values, fonts used, and so on.

The existing DORA logo and website led the way on the look. The DORA website uses a lot of black, white, and gold. (You can see that in a website screenshot in the lower left corner.) Those colours get used again in Reformscape and in the poster. The website mostly uses the Lora typeface (freely available), and that was also used in the poster.

Columns, not boxes

To simplify the poster, I made the implied two column layout an explicit two column layout by consolidating the boxes. I threw in a thin gold dividing line just for a little visual interest.

Giving the title punch

I had designed a wordmark for Reformscape, which Alex hadn’t seen yet. 

Again, it uses the DORA website colours and fonts. “Reform” is in Rutan, and “scape” is in the aforementioned Lora.

So it made sense to include that and put it up at the top, big. The institution logos were at the top, next to the title. They were drawing too much attention, so they got moved down to the bottom and shrunk slightly.

To distinguish the authors from the main body of the poster, I made that gold. I rounded the upper corners just to provide a break from the rectangular shapes on the poster.

I try to keep decorations to a minimum, but there was enough space in the upper right corner for another visual element that will be used for Reformscape. Our partner, the TRAFIK design team, had created a graphics that were based on a glowing gold version of the DORA logo.

I love 😍 them, so I put one in.

Luckily, the rest of the team liked the impromptu revision! 

P.S.—Reformscape will be launching before the end of the year! If you have questions about it, email reformscape@sfdora.org!

Link roundup for September 2023

Best poster prize ever. 

Kristen Zuloaga wrote:

My 8 year old judged posters from my lab and Zuloaga lab at local Society for Neuroscience conference.

My grad student Emily Groom won him over with mice being stressed because they couldn’t play with their friends. 😂

• • • • •

Clair Sewell shared her slides and notes from a presentation on “Creating an effective conference poster.”

While slide decks alone are not as good as when accompanied by a presenter, the information here is generally quite good.

• • • • •

Had a few YouTube videos on poster design lately, the latest of which is from Cooked Illustration:

• • • • •

New paper shows that in dentistry, posters are less likely to match the final publication than oral talks are.

The authors explain this as a function of differences in peer review:

(O)ral presentation abstracts were subjected to rigorous expert review and had higher study quality and scientific priority than poster abstracts, which made higher consistency of oral presentation abstracts.

Again, this pattern has been shown many times. 

Wang G, Chen J, Li H, Miao C, Cao Y, Li C. 2023. Reporting inconsistency between published conference abstracts and article abstracts of randomised controlled trials in prosthodontics presented at IADR general sessions. PeerJ 11:e15303. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15303

• • • • •

A case study in using Adobe XD to create and host a poster session. 

Gehling R. 2023. From teacher to learner: Using digital technology to enhance authenticity and engagement in poster presentations in the classroom and online. Proceedings of The Australian Conference on Science and Mathematics Education. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/IISME/article/view/17571

• • • • •

Angela Collier articulates some of the problems with violin plots. I get that sometimes you want to show unusual distributions. But as Angela says, we have a simpler graph for that: a histogram.

There is a lot more critique here, much of it funny, and much serious too.

Why does my poster look different when it’s printed full size?

Maureen Stone was on a recent episode of the Policy Vis podcast talking about the intricacies of colour. 

I’ve talked here about how designing a poster on a computer screen is so different from a printed poster. The light source is a big difference, and the resolution of screen is too. But I hadn’t often considered the size of the screen.

That was brought up in this segment of the interview:

Maureen Stone: Well, so I call that problem color and size, and it’s a really well known color perception phenomenon. So I’m going to give people a little bit of a geek definition, color is not how you create it, it’s not the RGB value, it’s how you perceive it; and how you perceive it depends on a lot of factors, we know it depends on background; and it turns out, size is a huge factor, so if you ever think about, you know, you ever go paint a room, and you got the little paint chips, so that’s a good color, and then you spread a bunch on the wall and say… 

Joel Schwabish: Yeah, have experienced several times, yes. 

Maureen Stone: Well, I didn’t know that it would apply to DataViz, but, in fact, it does. 

Joel Schwabish: Right.

Maureen Stone: And so, the real problem is technically what happens is that as the stimulus is the thing you’re looking at gets smaller, the color appears less vivid, less colorful, okay? And as you shrink them way down, pretty soon you’re just getting kind of warm, cool colors.

We see bigger colours as brighter colours.

A computer screen might be what, two feet wide? A printed poster might be four, six, or eight feet wide.

So something that might seem appropriately subtle on your small computer screen could seem garish when its area is four to eight to sixteen times bigger.

One way to test this might be to print just a small letter sized piece of the poster, but print it at full size, so you can get a better sense of how the colours will play.

External links

 Policy Viz podcast #244: Maureen Stone

Review: The Little Guide to Giving Poster Presentations

The Little Guide to Giving Poster Presentations is well named. It is, indeed, little.

Perhaps too little.

John Bond’s book weighs in at 150 pages, and they are kind of small pages, too. A fast reader can probably skim through this in a day without too much trouble. That this is a quick read is not necessarily a bad thing. Part of it is because Bond’s prose is clear.

Unfortunately, the book’s treatment of its subject also encourages skimming, because sometimes there isn’t as much depth as you would hope for.

Posters are a visual medium, so you might that a book about posters would be illustrated. But you don’t get to a diagram until Chapter 11. There’s one more figure in that chapter, and then nothing. And they aren’t in colour, either.

Sometimes, Bond even draws attention to the “little” of the title. In Chapter 21, he writes:

Information regarding color choices for charts and graphs could fill a whole chapter or even a book (and likely does).

But then, having drawn our attention to the rich subject of colour use in data visualizations, Bond ends the chapter a couple of pages later. Without pointers to other resources. (The book’s references are few and far between.)

There are some bright spots. This is the first book about conference posters that mentions the changes to the academic conference scene wrought by the ongoing covid pandemic. I also appreciated a section about how to estimate costs of attending conference, which I don’t remember seeing in other poster making resources.

While I craved more depth, I don’t fault most of the recommendations that Bond makes. The advice is consistently good. Bond feels more comfortable with writing: the book devotes three sections about planning and writing, but only one section to design, and one to presenting.

Bond’s book will help those who read it, and I am sure some readers will appreciate its readily digestible format. And the book contributes to the push to try to get people to take posters more seriously. There were next to no books to conference posters for so long that I’m pleased to see more arriving in this space.

References

Bond J. 2023. The Little Guide to Giving Poster Presentations. Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475870152/The-Little-Guide-to-Giving-Poster-Presentations-Simple-Steps-to-Success