I’m looking through you

A coloured background can make a poster pop – when done carefully.

To make a coloured background work, pick your figures carefully. These are the big three pixel-based image formats.

JPG: This is the most popular and familiar format. It is used on the web routinely because it has a wider color range than previous formats (24 bit), and generally has smaller file sizes than other formats.

GIF: This format is older than JPG. It can’t render as many colours as a JPG (8 bit). You can also create short animated images in GIF format, though you couldn’t use that on a poster.

PNG: This GIF successor can render 24 bit colour.

One important difference between these formats is transparency. Here’s a demonstration:

The JPG on the left looks shoddy compared to the GIF on the right.

JPG images can’t do transparencies. Every pixel must be coloured. Images that fine against a white background, like a white sheet of paper, can suddenly be floating in a white rectangle on top of your beautiful poster background. And suddenly, you have started down the road to boxism.

GIF and PNG images can do transparencies, which can allow any underlying colour to show through. It’s not automatic; you do have to watch the setting when you’re saving the image.

If you have an existing JPG that you like, one workaround is to match the space around your image with your poster background. This isn’t difficult if you have a simple background colour, but quickly becomes a headache if you want textured or shaded background.

But if you’re going to go to that much effort to edit the picture, you might as well mask out the background areas, then save a copy in PNG format. This can take a little fiddling in your graphics editor to do, but the result is worth it.



Related posts

Will it scale?
Never let them see your pixels

External links

Wednesday Surgery on Jim Campbell’s Comic Book Lettering Blog

Overcoming your fears in poster sessions

Over at the Women in Wetlands blog, Dr. Doyenne has been doing a wonderful series of posts looking at self-promotion. In a recent post, Socially Inept Scientists, she talks about how poster sessions are invaluable for those who are uncertain or shy. And let’s face it... that describes a lot of academics, and particularly scientists. I’ve added a little emphasis to her quote.

One very easy and less painful way to meet people is during the poster sessions. There are lots of people standing by their posters expecting (hoping) others will approach them. It’s very awkward for poster presenters to stand there waiting for someone to approach. So they will often be relieved when someone comes along and starts up a conversation. You also have lots of opportunities to meet many people – especially people doing work in your field. However, I’ve found it’s sometimes easier to talk to people who work on topics I know little about. By confiding to the poster presenter that you don’t know anything about their field puts them at ease. Students and young scientists are especially afraid some expert is going to come along and ask them a question they can’t answer or will disparage their work. So, they will be especially open to someone who knows little about their topic. Ask them to explain their work to you (you can say you’ve always been fascinated with the topic, but that it is outside your field). By doing so, you put them into the role of expert and you in the role of interested listener. Few people can resist an opportunity to be looked upon as the more knowledgeable in a conversation.

The rest of her series on self-promotion is wonderful, useful stuff. Check it out. Start with To Brag or Not to Brag, and carry through the rest of the September posts, and continuing through October.



Photo by TeodoraS on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Coral reef science

Malaria, Bed Bugs, Sea Lice, & Sunsets, has an interesting gallery of posters from the 11^th International Coral Reef Symposium, from July of this year.

Some are an overkill of words. Others let the data do the talking. And then some are just simply beautiful works of art, in my opinion.

Dear conference organizers

Poster sessions can be the beating heart and transcendent soul of a conference, or the first thing on the list at the bitch session afterward. Here’s how you conference organizers can help your attendees love your poster session.

Give us space – lots of it. 15 square feet minimum. 20 square feet or more is even better. Get the square footage of the room you are planning on holding the session in, and divide it by the number of posters. (Hat tip to Jim Belanger for this observation!)

Not all at once. It’s tempting to put all the posters in a single related topic together. It makes them easier to find. But don’t forget, people who are presenting posters are often the the very people who most want to see those other posters on the same topic. Give presenters a chance to look around; they want to see other stuff, too.

Lighting. Too many poster session rooms are wannabe nightclubs. They’re just too dim. And given that scientists tend to make dubious colour choices, as I have documented in this blog many, many times, it can make it hard to read the poster.

Flat floor. What could possibly go wrong with posters on tripods on stairs?

Nothing in the walkways. Too often, there is a table stuck apparently at random in the the middle of a corridor. Suddenly, you have a traffic jam. Put everything at the end of the poster row.

Water. All that talking can make you thirsty. Make sure there is a source of water readily and constantly available that doesn’t require someone to leave the session for ten minutes. Other refreshments are nice, but nothing beats water.

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

PowerPoint posters: Don’t turn away for even a second

If you use PowerPoint to make a conference poster, remember that it’ll screw you if you’re not watching it closely.

It has the best intentions. It’s just trying to help. But intentional or not, it still screws you.

The problem arises when you try to stick a lengthy block of text into a text box that is too big. PowerPoint will try to make all those words fit.

It’s fairly obvious when PowerPoint changes the point size. Point size is prominently displayed on the ribbon, and when you right click the text. But point size isn’t the only thing PowerPoint fiddles with.

PowerPoint tries to preserve the point size whenever it can. To keep the words as large as possible, it will first rachet down the line spacing (a.k.a. leading). A mild case is shown above.

To check the spacing in PowerPoint 2010, right click the text and select the “Paragraph...” option. This will show line spacing options. PowerPoint 2003 users will go to the “Format” menu, then look for “Line Spacing...”

From there, you can set if from “Multiple” back to “Single,” or even better, a value bigger than 1.

You can turn this “autofit” option off, but you have to dig for it. In PowerPoint 2010, you have to go up to the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” (The down arrow in the upper left) and pick “More commands.” You’ll be in the main “Options” menu, at the “Quick Access Toolbar” section. Look left and up to find then go to “Proofing” section. Then look for “AutoCorrect Options...” and pick the second tab, “AutoFormat As You Type.” Finally, uncheck “AutoFit body text to placeholder.”

No, the PowerPoint team don’t exactly go out of their way to make it easy to find.

Here’s the single spaced version:

This one paragraph on its own may not look so bad, but people making posters with PowerPoint often end up with a lot of text boxes. Because the PowerPoint squishes the text in each box differently, you can easily end up with of different line spacing all across the poster. One paragraph with single space, another paragraph with 0.8, another with 0.9...

Lack of consistency makes a poster look sloppy, even if a viewer may not be able to say exactly why.

Related posts

Leading thoughts

Myths of beautiful text

Ian Millington has suggestions about making text look good. He’s talking about text on the web, but there is some material relevant to posters.

Some claims are supported more by tradition than anything else, but this is often the case with text. For instance, Millington, in agreement with many other typographers, claims:

First-language English readers recognize words by their shape(.)

Kevin Larson lays this claim to waste in one of the most epic articles I have ever read on the science of reading, complete with a lengthy reference list of peer-reviewed research articles.

Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word.

I also think Millington is too hard on sans serif fonts, geometric fonts, and white paper. (And, as a neurobiologist, I also think that he overuses the term “hardwired” for the brain.) But lots of good ideas nevertheless.

Hat tip to Chris Atherton, WildWinter, Jan Schultnik, and Daniel Tenner.

RTFP?

What the least read book in the world?

The owner’s manual.

What fraction of your owner’s manuals have read completely? Your car? Your digital camera? Your graphics software?

Recently, I put up a Venn diagram showing what people put on posters versus what people want from posters. That resonated with some ideas that Kathy Sierra discussed in an online presentation. in particular, she showed another version of this figure from from her brilliant and much-missed Creating Passionate Users blog.

Which attracts you and makes you want to learn more?

Most posters look more like less like the brochures on the left and a lot more like the owner’s manuals on the right. I think posters look like owner’s manuals because people are aping journal articles.

Remember the trap? Making a poster is often the first time you’re thinking through the data. And it’s easy to think more about, “How is that data is going to go into the paper I eventually want to publish?” than “What’s right for the poster?”

Related posts

Should your first presentation be a poster?

Poster Venn