Link roundup for September 2012

The Singular Scientist looks at QR codes.

It’s a best of list, because people love lists. This one is 20 data visualization tools.

An augmented reality poster

I’ve talked about various ways to make posters more interactive, from using QR codes to showing video. This is another step in making posters more dynamic: using augmented reality.

Jump to the 4 minute mark to see what Adem Bilican did with his poster:


ECCB12 poster awards ceremony by abilican
Given this and the winning poster at this year’s Neuroethology congress, it seems that one of the ways to make a successful poster is to transcend the poster format. How can you give someone more than a piece of paper on a board?

External links

Poster prize at ECCB12 with my augmented reality poster
ECCB12 poster awards ceremony
ECCB 2012: Bioinformatics with a Swiss Flavour
ECCB12 poster prize for A Bilican

Hat tip to Guillaume Collet.

Usable space

I like using all the space available to me on my posters. Big posters are easy to read and can get more attention.

At a recent conference, the organizers told the presenters that the poster boards were 8 feet by 4 feet, or 92 inches by 48 inches. But 92 inch by 48 inch posters didn’t fit on the board. The organizers had measured the poster boards from edge to edge, outside of the metal frame. The frame took up about an inch of space on all four sides.

When making your poster, make it 2 inches shorter in both dimensions than what the organizers tell you the space is. That will give you a little wiggle room if the organizers have miscalculated the available space. From my experience, this happens frequently.

This is going too far, though:

It looks like you’re not even trying.

Related posts

Board numbers

Chemistry is magic!

Neil Withers spotted this poster on Reddit:

One of my friends entrusted my group and I to print his poster for a conference...he chose poorly.

You can click to enlarge...

I’m going to go out on a limb here. While this was meant as a joke...

I actually think it’s kind of effective.

Remember what the point of a poster is? It’s to give people something to talk about. And this poster does that, make no mistake. If I saw this poster, I would walk up to it and start a conversation.

The trick, though, is to make people go away remembering the science and not the joke. That wouldn’t be easy, because the joke is so good. But if you took away the joke, you might have far fewer chances to explain the science. On your next poster, maybe you can loosen up and have a little fun.

Related posts

Conversation piece

Hat tip to Biochem Belle.

Additional, 17 October: Sciencegurl noticed this in her department.

Link roundup, August 2012

Certain styles of movie posters get used again and again (English summary here).

Speaking of limitations, Laura Bergells (a.k.a. Maniactive) has an exercise in slide design that’s worth trying with your conference poster:

(N)otice what happens when you start from a place of restriction and gradually open yourself up to a few new features. You’ll start to see what’s really essential — and what might be distracting.

X-Gal at Journal of Cell Science dispenses conference advice, including some good thoughts on the poster session:

With the current trend of playing your cards close to your chest, you're unlikely to hear much new on the podium – it’s the posters where most of the valuable information can be extracted. Even if the author hasn’t dared to print the fine details, you can often coax things out of them with a friendly chat. I once went to spy on a competitor’s work, terrified that I was about to be scooped, only to end up agreeing to a collaboration that turned out to be unexpectedly productive. But that never would have happened if we hadn’t had that excuse to meet in person and discuss our common ground.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: stuff gets done at poster sessions.

The Scholarly Kitchen looks at the relationship between typefaces and authority.

Designing communications for a poster fair is a few years old, but has some good advice, much of which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog.

I’ve seen variations of this idea on a few sites, but this is a particularly well done example. If movies had crappy fonts:


I’ve seen variations of making pictures using type before, but this one is particularly fun, because it uses superheroes.

We go into the archives from 1997 for how to give a poster nobody remembers. Hat tip to Bastian Greshake.

The data prison

You should not use tables on posters. But if you insist...

Here is how you are likely to see a table on a poster.

This is a classic example of what Edward Tufte (1990) called “data-imprisonment”: every piece of information in its own separate cell. Academics love to draw boxes around things, so it’s no surprise that you see this done on tables. All. The. Time.

Some don’t stop there.

“Zebra stripes” can work on a table, if the shades are subtle. But they are over used, and most often badly used.

Here is how you are likely to see a table in a journal, laid out by professionals.

From Patton et al. (2010).

See the difference? No vertical lines. Very few horizontal lines. No zebra stripes. It’s done with white space and careful alignment.

Free the data!

Related posts

If you must use a table
Burn your tables
Boxism

Reference

Tufte E. 1990. Envisioning Information. Graphics Press.

iPoster

Sometimes, no graph can substitute for a good video. This is particularly true in the field of animal behaviour and neuroethology. As I mentioned previously, I was just at the Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, and I saw a few people trying to bring video to their poster, including me.

On my poster, I did two things. First, I snitched a lot of tacks and used them to mount an iPad.

Several people thought this was brave of me. I knew it would work, because I had seen Bradley Voytek do this at last year’s Neuroscience meeting. With enough tacks, and new poster boards, that iPad was in there solidly. It wasn’t going to hit the floor unless the entire poster board went over.

Because I wasn’t by my poster at all times, and I didn’t want to leave my new iPad unattended, I printed a QR code to the video behind the iPad:

I was kind of proud of this, because I planned ahead. I used some good practices in the text (telling people exactly what the code was). I left just enough space so that this would be concealed when the iPad was in place.

Other presenters were also using iPads, but mounting them in different ways. The next two photos are from the same poster, on different days:

On day on, the presented used the iPad cover to act as a sort of lanyard arrangement.

By day two, the presented decided just to hang the iPad over the top of the poster board frame. Now this was what made me nervous.

I discovered one minor little problem with using an iPad to show people video, though. I would have liked for the video to be showing continuously, looping, so I didn’t have to be fiddling with it anew for every poster customer. There is no way to do that using the normal video app in the iPad. You have to resort to a few hacks to get looping video.

Another person, not wanting to risk an expensive iPad, just used a digital photo frame instead.

But as long as you can have someone by the poster, the risk to putting you iPad on the poster is minimal.

Related posts

How to show a dung beetle running
More power! The poster with a plug