No more slidesters, part 4: Memory whiplash with Poster 8

In my efforts to find good alternatives to PowerPoint for making a poster, I took the approach that I use to solve all my problems. I went to Google and typed in “poster software.”

This led me to the Poster Software website. When I first saw it, I immediately thought, “I hope the software is better than the website design.”

The website is seriously old school. The multiple coloured fonts, the little linky icons, reminded me of the early days of the web, circa the heyday of Geocities.

And the opening screen of Poster 8 is much the same. It rotates through different graphics, but they all have a very similar feel. Lots of different fonts, showing off multiple shading effects at random. It took me back to my days working with Windows 3.1. Or maybe a Radio Shack Color Computer 3. Okay, maybe that’s going a little too far, although several of the testimonials date to the late 1990s.

The program opened up with an letter sized page. I wanted to make a 4 foot by 3 foot poster, so I looked at how to change the page size.

And I got stopped.

I got sent to the “Printer setup” page, which had a convenient indicator of where to change page size.

The problem was, this led to the standard “printer properties” window. I was supposed to set up the page dimensions there. But I had normal, boring desktop printers, not any capable of printing something 4 by 3 feet. So I couldn’t set the paper size as large as I needed.

So my experience with Poster 8 software ended after less (much less) than 10 minutes.

There is a PDF converter, but it’s not available in the trial version. And I wasn’t enticed enough to shell out the cash for the full version. My overall impression was that this might be great for printing a banner for a garage sale, but it wasn’t going to deliver the goods for a serious technical poster for an academic conference.

Related posts

The “No more slidesters” series

• Part 1: PowerPoint, the problem child of posters
• Part 2: Publisher, the alternative you (probably) already own
• Part 3: OpenOffice Draw, free and better than PowerPoint
• Interlude: Prezi, for make presentations more like posters

Sweating the small stuff

A lot of the stuff I discuss on this blog is a little anal retentive, I admit. Fiddly little alignments, spacing, matching up typefaces, more alignment, more futzing with spacing... Are those last few changes it worth it?

Seth Godin explains why it pays to sweat those last few details.

In most fields, there's an awful lot of work put into the last ten percent of quality. ...

Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the message is almost the same...

Except it’s not. Of course not. The message is not the same.

The last ten percent is the signal we look for, the way we communicate care and expertise and professionalism.

This is why I write about using Helvetica instead of Arial, and anything instead of PowerPoint.

Poster versus talk, May 2010 edition

At the Uncertain Principles blog, Chad Orzel takes a survey on whether people would rather present a poster versus give a talk. There’s a lively comment thread that might explain some of the reasons for the three to one lead one format has over the other. (No, I’m not telling you which one!)

Related posts

Poster or talk?
Should your first presentation be a poster?

Conversation piece

If you walked into a room with that table, you’d have something to talk about, wouldn’t you? It would be almost impossible not to ask what the heck it was doing in that living room, where it was bought, and for goodness’s sake, why?

It is a remarkable object, in the sense that Seth Godin uses the term (emphasis added):

As I travel around spreading the word of the Purple Cow, a lot of people appear confused about just what “remarkable” means. It’s not elitist. It’s not weird. It’s not cheap or expensive or big or small. It’s any or all of these things... it’s just something worth talking about.

A conference poster should be a remarkable object. The job of a poster is to start conversations.

To put it another way, a poster is a social object. People are often more comfortable talking about some third object than they are either talking about themselves, or their conversational partner. After all, talking about yourself, or the person you’re talking to, is not an easy thing to do: it requires some trust.

What starts conversations? Above all else, you need something recognizable if you want to start a conversation. If there is nothing a novice can comprehend at a glance, you’re not going to have conversations.

But you have an even better chance of starting conversations if that entry point is remarkable. That remarkable thing can be an amazing fact. It can be a tantalizing question. Or, like the table above, it just might be unusual, edgy, or unexpected.

Related links

Entry points: Five ways to make your poster more inviting

Seth’s Blog: How to be remarkable

Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog: Exhibits and artefacts as social objects.

Furniture from here. Ad from here.

So you need a typeface?

The “So you need a typeface?” flowchart is taken from here from designer Julian Hansen. Click to enlarge.

It’s a fun graphic, but alas! There is no “research poster” starting point. Either “infographic” or “newspaper” might be good starting points if you want to try it for your poster.

P.S. – If in doubt, use Helvetica. And not that Arial knock-off, either; Helvetica.

Maestros wanted

I’m looking for inspiration.

I’m looking for talent and craftsmanship.

I’m looking for people whose posters consistently stand out.

People who give good consistently talks can become well-known for doing so. People who make consistently good posters... I can’t think of a single one.

Beautiful slide decks even have their own archives. For instance, I recently discovered Note & Point, a self-described collection of slideware slides “looking that much better.” I’m sure there are many others.

But there isn’t anywhere you can go for a similar gallery of really knockout conference posters. You can find good posters at ePosters and the Pimp my Posters Flickr group, but those have different mandates, really. The former is a general archive, the latter a testing ground.

That’s why I would like your help. If you know a colleague who is great at making posters, please let me know. If you find a single poster somewhere that is just a masterpiece, send me the link. I’d like to start featuring their work, finding out what they do to make great posters, and sharing that with you.

Wearing a black tuxedo is admired, but in no way required.

Survey: What do you use?

This week marks the last week of classes for many academics. This means that conference season will soon go into full swing. Many posters will be designed, printed, and presented in the next few months.

To better understand the needs of poster makers, I have started a poll that will run through summer. You can see the poll over on the right side of the screen. The question is simple: What software do you prefer to use to make conference posters?

Please take a second to vote – assuming, of course, that you actually make posters! (I can’t image why you’re reading if you don’t, but what you do on your side of the phosphor dots is your business.)

Additional: If your preferred tool isn’t listed, please vote “Something else” and leave a note in the comments, or email me.

Update: The poll is now closed, and the results are here

Photo by secretlondon123 on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.