What shall we do with a missing poster?

This was the plan:

This was the reality.

A plain sheet of paper with hand drawn lettering (possibly done with a Sharpie) saying, “Disgust and religion, ask me about it!”

I wondered, “What do you want to bet that presenter John Terrizzi had more conversations at this meeting than if he’d brought his planned poster?”

I reached out to John for his story, which he was kind enough to share (lightly edited; emphasis added).

This was quite a “happy accident.” It was one of my favourite human moments. 

Here is the backstory about how it happened.

My wife and daughters accompanied me on the trip to Belgium for the International Convention of Psychological Science. Traveling for us is always a calamity.  If you are familiar with National Lampoon’s vacation movies, we are sort of the “Griswolds” of family adventures.

Upon boarding the train from the airport, I did a sort of accounting of all our stuff. Poster, check. Both kids, check. Kids stuff, check. I began putting all of the stuff on the rack above us. First, the poster then all of our daughters' bags, stuffed animals, and favorite blanky.

When we departed the train, I grabbed all of the important things, my children and their stuff. The poster, which had rolled to the back (out of sight, out of mind) was left behind, hopefully to do its own European tour, but more likely to get stuck in a Sysphysean back and forth from downtown Brussels to the airport.

Upon arriving at our hotel, I realized my blunder. No poster!

Rather than be dismayed, I resolved to share my story with my fellow confrencers. With my wife’s help, I repurposed my colleague’s discarded poster and shared my story. It resulted in a lot of fruitful conversations.

I research the emotion of disgust. This particular poster was about some of my work that explores the relationship between disgust and religious beliefs. Disgust is a particularly nasty emotion that can have costly consequences for our attitudes toward other people (i.e., prejudice and xenophobia), but it can also have negative consequences for our attitudes toward ourselves (e.g., self-disgust and shame). One of the potential solutions to the problems that disgust can present is exposure. Accepting that we make mistakes and being alright with that.

As a person that has made a lot of mistakes in my life, I have developed compassion for myself and others, which allows me to tolerate the messy world that we live in. Losing my poster allowed me to model this tolerance in a way that, hopefully, inspires others to risk being human.

I don’t have any social media accounts, so I didn’t realize this went viral until I started getting emails and texts from colleagues and friends. One of my favourite references to this was an email that I got from the print shop on my university campus. I was having some posters printed for my undergraduates who are presenting at a regional conference.  The woman who works in the print shop emailed me to let me know that the posters were ready to be picked up and said, “Don’t leave them on the train this time. 😉”

Thanks to John for sharing this story – and giving a chance for people to see his original poster!

Photo by Olivier Klein.

P.S.—The title of this blog post is more fun if you sing it to the tune of “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”

Related posts

A tale of... terror!

Link roundup for March 2023

It’s time for you monthly anthology of quick hits on things that are somehow tangentially related to poster, poster sessions, and conferences!

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There are going to be quite a few book reviews here on the blog over the next few weeks. But there’s one I just learned about, that I want to review but can’t.

It’s in German. Alas, I do not read German.

Stefan Lang was written a guide to conference posters called Wissenschaftliche Poster: Vom Kongressabstract bis zur Postersession. He has a blog post describing the book. An excerpt (using of Google Translate):

In my book you will find neither a theoretical theory of colours nor the rules of the golden ratio. Rather, it’s about how you should go about doing things practically to create a scientific poster—a poster that doesn’t just show data, but presents research results. My guide therefore deals with the following questions:

• Selection of information: Which facts belong on the poster?
• Core message and keywords: Where do I place my most important statements?
• Professional tools or PowerPoint: How do I implement my ideas?
• Reader guidance: How do I guide the viewer through difficult material?
• Leave nothing to chance: How do I prepare for the congress ?

If you are reading this blog post in German using Google Translate, you may want to check out this book instead of mine. If you do, please tell me more about it!

• • • • •

This thread by Jessie Char on why Apple has both a Music app and a Music Classical app is super interesting.

Classical music is tricky to categorize. There are who knows how many recordings of Holst’s The Planets, for instance. (Wikipedia says there are at least 80 recordings of The Planets.) How will a classical musical fan search for the recording they want? The composer? The conductor? The year the music was written or the year it was recorded?

The selection task is so different from typical contemporary pop music that it makes more sense for there to be a dedicated app.

Journal articles are like classical music: they revel in rich, detailed information. Posters are like pop music: the information you need is streamlined and more suitable for quick browsing.

Char sure doesn’t like the icon, though.

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I’m not sure what a conference abstract from 10 years ago popped up in my alerts, but it did. If anyone was in Japan in 2012 and saw this presentation about tracking people in poster sessions, let me know. Excerpt: 

This paper proposes a new real-time 3-D head shape and pose estimation method for analyzing inter- actions in poster sessions. ... We implement a proof-of-concept system and demonstrate our method can estimate shapes and poses of two unknown person in real-time.

 • • • • •

 Berkeley Mono typeface is inspired by classic computer monitors.

Hat tip to Edward Tufte.

• • • • •

Poster projects are fun!

At least, 95% of students in the paper below agreed that poster projects are fun.

Here’s a paper on the use of posters for teaching.

Cuenca Gotor V et al. 2022. Project-based learning using scientific poster as a tool for learning and acquisition of skills in physics subjects of engineering bachelor’s degrees. A: SEFI 50th Annual conference of The European Society for Engineering Education. Barcelona: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, p. 1113-1121. https://doi.org/5821/conference-9788412322262.1138

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Thanks for joining me this month!

Canva revisited

I reviewed Canva back in 2020. Canva has introduced many new features since then, so here are a few quick updates on the platform. 

Size seems to have increased, but is still limited. I still can’t make a poster that’s 6 feet wide by 4 feet tall. But now it seems to have a limit on total area. I think when I reviewed it before, it had a hard limit on height and width. I can now make a poster that’s 6 feet wide by 2 feet tall, which I don't think I could before.

There are now university research poster templates. (They may have been there before, but I don’t think so.) Search the templates for “Research Posters” and you get about 20 or so different templates. 

 A couple are recognizably based on Mike Morrison’s billboard style posters.

 Many have the same boilerplate text that doubles as a guide.

How to make a research poster: A guide for students

Many technologies and breakthroughs would not be possible without research.
It is important to keep members of the community informed about the latest updates. One way to do that is through research posters.

Most of the templates are good on colour and typography. 

But most have too much fine text. 

Some have confusing layouts.

Canva has certainly improved as a platform for making conference posters. It would still not be my “go to” for posters, because the size limitations bother me.

Related posts 

Canva review

Don’t make your figures like journal figures

I’ve written about the importance of respecting reading order on this blog many times. English readers generally look at the top left of a page first, because that’s where we have learned that text starts.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how scientific journal articles break information apart. But I didn’t realize another shortcoming of typical journal figure layouts.

You are supposed to start reading in the middle. It’s not necessarily clear if you will end up at the last image in the figure or the end of the figure legend.

Not only that, you have to look back and forth from the legend to the images. Your eyes are constantly travelling. 

But graphics from news organizations (like the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, Nature or Science magazines, and so on) do things a different way. The title goes at the top.

Rather than having the description underneath, the graph is annotated. This makes the graph less compact, true, but reading it is more in line with our reading expectations.

The more I think about it, the more I think this format is a much better model for figures on posters..

Conference posters in movies: Awake

The opening minutes of the Netflix movie Awake (2021) take place in a secured research building. How do I know?

Posters!

You can see them in the right side of all of these screen shots.

There are a few posters in this tracking shot, but the one closest to the edge of screen is the only one where the components are visible. Solid two column layout. This is the only poster we see with any colour: some orange in the section headers.

The two posters in the shot above drove me a little nuts. Typical academic poster, far too much tiny text. At least the one on the left has a good “hero” figure in the upper left. Two columns again, which is a little unusual, since three columns are more common.

As star Gina Rodriguez enters the room, we see two more in the background. Two columns again, clearly with a lot of small text. Neither appears to have any graphics, although there are some shaded boxes in the right one, perhaps highlighting tables.

 Finally...

While the shot is a bit dark, this is the only poster whose title can be seen.

Appropriately enough for a movie about people not being able to sleep, the poster is “The impact of caffeine”!

Here’s a close-up, brightened up for visibility:

The only poster using the classic three column layout.

At first, I thought the posters must have just been there in the location they were filming in. But this is so on point with the movie that I am thinking that maybe the art director dressed the space with posters? At least this one? 

That the posters have such a consistent design and so little colour also make me think these are set decorations. You wouldn’t want brightly coloured posters in this dimly lit scene.

Maybe I’ve been at this too long when I’m paying more attention to the posters than the end-of-civilization plot...

External links

Awake on Netflix

Awake on IMDb

Plastic octopus

This is not timely post. But join me and step into the Wayback Machine with me, to go back to 2017. I stumbled across this award winning poster from Stephanie Harris. This is from the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour Easter meeting from that year.

I was looking at is, and thought... “Wait, what is that just to the right of her certificate?” I zoomed in.

It’s a plastic octopus. But not some plastic octopus randomly attached to the poster for no reason. It was actually used in the research project to test birds’ personalities.

So I just wanted to make this very short post to remind people that you can use your poster space to do more than just put up a sheet of paper.

The annual tradition continues: the Better Posters blogiversary

We made it. Fourteen years, my friends! That’s a lot!

Having been in a pandemic for a few years, I don’t take it for granted that a project will make it another year. So I’m glad this one has.

One of the reasons I started this blog was that I thought there was so much more to say about posters than was normally being said. And I think the fact that this has made it for 14 years shows that was something to that hunch.

Whether what I have to say about the topic is valuable or interesting is a decision I will leave to you. 😉

As always, I thank you for your attention.