If you must use a table

On posters, graphs are better than tables. There is not much that can be presented in a table that cannot be presented in a graph.

If you feel you must use a table for some reason, check these tips at In the Haystack.

Like me, author Boris Gorelik is fond of rules of two.

Photo by oskay on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Two rules of two

Too many posters suffer from trying to do too much. I suggest two rules of two to limit the damage.

Two typefaces. That gives you one typeface for the bulk of the poster text, and one display typeface for section headings. The only situation I can think of where you might need to use other typefaces is if you have some sort of foreign language or special symbols in your text. And don’t you dare cheat and say, “Well, Arial and Verdana are both sans serif fonts, so I’ll just count them as one.” The variation between regular, bold, and italic don’t count towards your limit, though.

Two colours other than black and  white. Use those two colours as your artistic little splash for backgrounds, to fill in bar graphs, colour your text if you want. You can vary their intensity, saturation, or what have you, but having large swathes of poster in three or more colours is rarely going to do you any favours.

But break either of these rules rather than do anything barbarous.

Photo by qthomasbower on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Never them them see your pixels

You want to take some pictures with your camera to illustrate your poster? Excellent! This is usually a much better choice than hopping onto the net and grabbing someone else’s images.^*

Camera pictures are going to be bitmapped images, made of lots of individual pixels. To ensure your picture looks good when you print it full sized on a poster, it pays to do a little calculation.

Remember to set your camera for the highest resolution possible. You can always lower the resolution of a picture if necessary, but you can never increase the resolution of a picture (notwithstanding what you see on crime shows). A problem here is that cameras often describe their image sizes in megapixels, which describes the total number of pixels in the image. For our purposes, it’s easier to think in terms of the number of pixels along the edges.

My camera gives me a little more than 3,000 pixels along the long edge of the photo at its highest resolution. But I have to be thinking about how many pixels will go into each inch on the poster.

Printers are still largely measuring print resolution in dots per inch (dpi); a dot is essentially a pixel. A old, low end fax machine might be 200 dots per inch; a laser printer might be 1,200 dots per inch. 300 dots per inch is usually considered an acceptable resolution for printing.

If want to keep my picture reasonably sharp, I want to make sure the picture has 300 dot per inch or better on the paper when printed full size.

For my camera, 3,000 pixels / 300 dots per inch = 10 inches. Thus, I don’t want the final size of the picture on my poster to be much more than 10 inches.

This particularly becomes an issue because people will pull images from the net to use on their posters. For instance, people will grab an institutional logo or such from a website and enlarge it. But many net images are only a few hundred pixels wide.

If you have an 800 pixel wide image, and you want to print it at 24 inches across, you have a print resolution of about 30 dpi. It’ll look like rubbish. It’ll still look poor if enlarged to 12 inches.

Related posts

Will it scale?

^* Picture by Potatojunkie on Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons license. Hey, this is a blog, not a poster. Remember, do as I say, not as I do!

Creative Beast

Although much of this blog is focused on discipline and craft, I am totally charmed by this set of slides about unleashing your creative beast.

No more slidesters, part 5: The specialist, PosterGenius 1.5

Poster Genius annoyed me a bit by putting ads in the Pimp my poster group on Flickr in the place where an actual poster should go. But I didn’t let it dissuade me from trying their free trial version. A few features are limited in the trial version, and it places a large notice that the poster was created using the trial version in the background of the poster. This review is based on the trial version of PosterGenius version 1.5.

I was immediately struck by how it plods through a very rigid input sequence. The PosterGenius strategy is to allow users very limited freedom. For example, you can only separate authors in the title section with a comma. You can’t put “Author and Author,” or “Author & Author.”

The layout? “Your poster vill have equally spaced vertical columns und you vill like it!”

The initial poster creation wizard runs like this:

1. Enter dimensions
2. Enter authors
3. Create sections
4. Pick a template

After you’ve run through the Wizard, you get a series of sections along the left. You can rearrange sections by dragging and dropping within this pane. Each section ends up functioning much like a PowerPoint slide in a deck: it is a self-contained set of text and graphics.

You enter text and pictures for each section in boxes along the bottom, in boxes that look like the “Notes” for individual PowerPoint slides. (Although I saw “left” and “bottom” here, that’s only the default view; you can change the position of these input screens somewhat.)

Many simple functions are surprisingly difficult to locate – particularly if you miss your chance to specify them during the Wizard set-up.

For example, if you insert a new section of text, it’s damn hard to figure out how to get rid of it. you can’t find an option in the pull down menus that says, “Delete section.” You can’t select it and hit the delete key on the keyboard. You can’t select it and right click it for a context-sensitive menu. I finally discovered that you can hit the delete button (a big red “X”) in the toolbar, but this seems to be the only thing that works.

Similarly, you are asked to pick the poster size in the initial set-up. But unlike almost every other program I’ve used of this sort, there’s no “page set up” option to be found in the pull down menus to allow you to change page size. Again, it’s (only?) in the toolbar. And page size is only in nearest whole centimeters. 100.5 cm? 48 inches? Forget it.

The combination of the walk-through creation and the surprisingly fussy controls makes the process of creating a poster feel like David Pogue’s “type a word” Wizard in this talk (fast forward to 7 minutes and 50 seconds).




As I mentioned briefly above, PosterGenius makes you lay out your poster in equally wide vertical columns. Everything must be contained in each column. No wide pictures that straddle two columns, for instance. This limitation will save many posters from turning into train wrecks.

The ability to change the number of columns quickly is sweet. Three columns not working? Change it to four and boom! Everything is automatically rescaled to the new narrower columns.

This is an opportune time to mention that PosterGenius doesn’t redraw the screen live. You have to hit a refresh button in the toolbar every time you want to see the changes you’ve made.

Going back to managing columns, when you change the number of columns, you may find the sections falling into inconvenient places. For example, you may find the “Results” heading sitting alone at the bottom of column 1, instead of appearing at the top of column 2. You can force sections to appear in the next column. The option is hidden under the “Advanced” section underneath where you type in the text for your section.

A “Typography” button allows you to set the font size, colour, and so on. You can set everything for each section individually, or all sections at once.

The available templates feature designs that look very much like those you’d find in PowerPoint. Some are simple and straightforward. Some have very generic “science-y” photo backdrops. There are medical backgrounds with syringes, people in a surgical masks, an IV unit, or a bunch of pills. There are math equations against a starry exploding background for the physicists. Bridges and powerlines for engineers. Many of the photo elements in the templates scream, “I visited iStock photo.” Several templates have music staffs. Do musicians often do posters?

Unfortunately, the PosterGenius templates facilitate putting “logo bookends” around the title. I think they’re mostly pointless, but at least most of the templates make the logos somewhat well spaced and modestly sized.

Another very nice feature is that there is a button that creates a printout for distribution. This is not fitting the poster on a standard letter sized piece of paper; this takes the contexts of the poster, and formats it as a proper document, like something that you’d make in Word.

There’s a series of things that Poster Genius can’t do in its current version.

• No spell check. In this day and age, this alone is close to a deal-breaker.
• You can’t import any vector-based file format. You’re stuck with jpg, gif, bmp, tif, and png, which is a good, albeit limited, set of choices.
• You can’t crop a picture. You would have to do this in another graphic editor, then import it.
• You can’t easily reorder pictures. You have to delete it (which can’t be undone), then insert it again.
• You don’t get to control where the poster is saved. Big drawback.
• If you include too much stuff, PosterGenius will generate a second page rather than warning you it won’t fit. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with an entire wasted page when printing.

All of these seem to be fairly simple things to fix over time. This software could be a thing of beauty by version 3 or so.

The bottom line

Poster Genius is a serious attempt to give academics great poster-making software. It’s a far better tool making posters than PowerPoint. (There’s your pull quote, Scigen Technologies!) Anyone who has never used anything other than PowerPoint to make a poster should check it out immediately. Anyone who already has a good grasp on high-end graphics software (e.g., Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw!) might want to check it out, but I expect they might not find it worth switching to PosterGenius quite yet.

Additional, and conflict of interest statement

I had written all of the above before I mentioned on Twitter that this review would be coming this month. Following that, I was emailed by a rep from Scigen out of the blue who gave me a license to use the full version. Despite my “There’s your pull quote” joke above, they didn’t ask for anything. I guess they really want me to kick the tires on the full and complete version. I may come back and do an update on this after I’ve spent more time with the full version.

The F1000 poster bank

The Faculty of 1000 is the latest entity to set up a poster archive. It’s announced on this blog post; you can find the archive itself here.

Although the archive is up and running, pickings may be a bit slim for a while. The massive Neuroscience meeting, which I know well, has just tens of posters. And it’s not at all clear how one will be able to browse through this archive.

I’ll be submitting a poster from the 2009 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting; I’ll let you know how the submission process goes.

This is the third conference poster archive I know of; Nature Precedings and ePosters are the others. It’ll be interesting to see which, if any, thrive. If there are more, please email me!

Still, none offer what I think is badly needed: a “best of the best” gallery where posters are chosen for primarily for graphic and design excellence, not so much for the cleverness of the science.

Related posts

What to do with the poster?

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