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
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.”
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
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:
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, theLibrary 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.
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
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!
• • • • •
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!
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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.
• • • • •
To my surprise, César does not mention the election map from Le Monde, which won a lot of praise on Twitter.
• • • • •
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?
• • • • •
I should really stop putting out every primer from MyFonts. But they’re so good. This one about using gray is no exception (PDF).
• • • • •
Three online courses for scientific illustration.
• • • • •
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.
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
For a couple of years, the American Geophysical Union has had a digital poster format that it chose to call eLighning. Here’s a introductory video from 2017:
The provider for this service is iPosters. I’m sure I’ve seen their logo somewhere before, but I can’t find any earlier posts about them on the blog.
Previously, AGU used this to have people present their “posters” on HD screens instead of paper at face-to-face meetings. Obviously, in the time of COVID-19, a huge meeting like AGU is not going to happen. The society has decided that this ePoster format is the one and only way to go. No PDFs, no PowerPoint, no PNGs.
Julia Carr has been playing with this format. Her impressions (edited):
You can’t customize the layout, meaning that you’re stuck with one of the templates. You have to click on individual panels to view the content of the poster. A simpler format would be a webpage format where presenters place information in a way that is designed for online consumption, or if that's too complicated, just encouraging presenters to submit PDFs arranged to scroll down.
The template with the largest “sections” that I saw divides the poster into quarters. So bad luck if you wanted to show off a single “hero” graphic.
The “clicking panels to open” motif feels like early multi-media experiments with CD-ROMs in the 1990s, where everyone was playing with hyperlinks and embedded videos. I agree with Julia that simple navigation in one direction would be far easier than constant opening and closeing windows. Because these are landscape screens, I would seems to me that something more like a slideshow would be optimal: swipe from right to left to see the next section.
The software both encourages and discourages bad habits.
The biggest pro to this software is that the posters are easy to build, and will help avoid some of the pitfalls of other posters (for example, there's a minimum font size, and the templates are fine for setting up a conventional poster layout).
That minimum font size is 10 points, however. That may not be as bad as it sounds, because these are online. But I would definitely go larger, considering that the size is a standard Windows desktop screen: 1920 by 1080 pixels. (If you have a computer screen that size, what you see will be what you get.)
There’s unlimited space within the boxes, so I’m anticipating folks copying entire manuscripts into the space.
The software also allows for people to upload random background pictures, which I have seen it misused many times.
I’m still trying to understand why so many online presentations are trying to imitate the common form of a poster when it has been freed from the constraints of paper.
Thanks to Julia Carr for the tip and comments!
External links
Creating your virtual poster presentation
iPoster demo video (over an hour long)
This week, more from Stephen Herd! If you haven’t seen his first effort, go back and have a peek before seeing how he pushed the envelope even further. Click to enlarge!
Stephen has this to say about this work (lightly edited).
I decided to focus on the images and text would be more like figure titles. This one was more ambitious. Inspiration for the second poster came from a packet of popcorn and also looking at movie posters.
Stephen attached this picture:
I see the resemblance. I would have guessed circus posters more than movie posters, but maybe that’s just the typeface.
Stephen continues:
One of my aims was to see if you can create a poster where the title isn’t at the top of the page. This created a lot of problems in how the other elements sit on the page and how they interact with the title at the center.
I mostly agree with Stephen’s analysis. That the title is in the middle is not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, I think it succeeds here in that it is immediately obvious what the title is. The type size, the circle, and the contrast all give the title a lot of visual weight and draw your eye there first.
The problem is, “Where do I go next?”
Stephen has two levels of headings. The major headings are “Experimental” and “Modelling.” Then there are subheadings like “Microstructure” and “Conclusion.” A problem is that the headings are too similar in size and appearance to clearly mark one as “major” and the other as “minor.”
I would have tried to stretch the “Experimental” and “Modelling” headings right across the width of the page, to more clearly separate the two sections of the poster. I think Stephen didn’t because he ended up with too much content in the “Experimental” section, and the “Modelling” banner is narrowed as a result, and once you have one heading in a narrow banner, the other gets put in a narrow banner so it’ll match.
It looks like an editorial problem more than a design problem. Too much stuff!Stephen concludes:
While I am still not 100% satisfied with the design, the poster was successful as it brought many people over to discuss the unique design and then go on to discuss my work.
I agree with Stephen again. This poster’s bold graphic sensibilities in the type choice, circles, and good use of text wrapping, make this stand out at a glance. And that “first glance” is critical for gaining and keeping attention.
Update: I heard more from Stephen about his choice of InDesign to create his posters.
The two main reasons I use InDesign are ease of controlling lots of elements on a single page and control of typography. Specifically:
Some other smaller advantages include: creating colour pallets, printing options like bleeds and efficient rendering of images ensures your computer doesn't slow down with heavy files.
- Being able to set guides on a page makes it a lot easier to create grid patterns and align objects.
- Putting elements on layers and controlling those layers, like locking or hiding layers. This can get particularly painful when you have lots of elements on a single page.
- Text wrapping is easy in desktop publishing software, but also things like drop caps, tracking, character width/height, paths etc.
I think that once you're over the initial learning curve, life is a lot easier when using the right tool for the job. I would be pretty daunted if someone asked me to replicate the poster designs exactly in PowerPoint. While you could get close to the overall design, I think it would both take longer and you would sacrifice the precise control that InDesign gives you.
Hope you enjoyed this two parter!
Related posts
Out now from Pelagic Publishing and fine bookstores.
Pelagic Publishing page for Better Posters
Bookshop.org page for Better Posters (hub for local retailers)
Amazon page for Better Posters
Chapters page for Better Posters
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