Link roundup for October 2018

October 25, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Critique and makeover: Middle Earth sea temperatures

Bergstrom and West think tilting graphs will make people less likely to make mistakes about them. An article in Nature provided this example:

Hat tip to Nature News and Comment.

• • • • •

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Critique and makeover: Middle Earth sea temperatures

November 1, 2018, 10:33 am

≫ Next: Blackout: Poster protests travel ban

≪ Previous: Link roundup for October 2018

No, I haven’t gone full Tolkien this week. Mediterranean means “Middle of the Earth,” right? This week’s poster about the Mediterranean Sea comes from kindly contributor Francisco Pastor. Click to enlarge!

Francisco is a repeat customer of this blog. One of his earlier poster was reviewed here last year, but this iteration is in Spanish. One of the things I like about graphic design is that you don’t always need to be able to understand the exact language to be able to offer advice! (Though I’m not sure what I would make of a poster in Korean or Hindi.)

Francisco’s aims were to “increase importance for graphical info and reduce text. I also tried to highlight conclusion sections and added a screenshot to publish our sea surface temperature website.” Compared to the previous poster, I think this version is more successful at meeting those goals. The images are bigger and the take home message is more obvious and cleaner.

But some problems that were in the previous poster are still creeping in on this poster. They’re small, mind you. But again, alignment is driving me crazy. Some elements are almost aligned. But not quite.

I’ve added a few black guidelines on this version of the poster so you can see more easily if you click to enlarge.

These sorts of little details are the monsters you see out of the corner of your eye: they almost escape your notice, but once you catch a glimpse of them, suddenly you see them everywhere. I first thought, “Oh, the conclusions don’t like up with the web portal.” Then I spotted another. And another.

In the revision below, I just moved a few pieces around to square things up.

In general, if you are working with rectangular elements – which is the most common thing on posters by a long way – align objects by their edges. And be super obsessive about it.

This can become tricky when you have maps and graphs that have small axis labels or other annotations, because you might think the edge is defined by the text. In some cases, it will look better if the edges of the blocks are aligned that exclude the text. I tried this down in the lower right corner. The maps for such strong visual impressions that you want to see the edges of the maps aligned, latitude and longitude markings be damned.

Related posts

Critique and makeover: Hot Mediterranean

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Blackout: Poster protests travel ban

November 8, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Critique: Digitized manuscripts

≪ Previous: Critique and makeover: Middle Earth sea temperatures

You are not supposed to take pictures on the poster session floor of the Neuroscience 2018 meeting.

Photography, video, filming, tape recording, and all other forms of recording are prohibited during the poster sessions, lectures, symposia, minisymposia, nanosymposia, courses, workshops, and on the exhibit floor.

But people broke the rules to take pictures of this poster.

Here’s a closer look at the one visible section of text:

It reads:

Unfortunately, due to the travel ban imposed on citizens of Iran and other countries I am unable to be here to present my poster. My supervisor and I therefore decided not to present the poster at all. Science should be about breaking down barriers not creating new ones. I hope to be able to make the next SFN conference in 2019.

This situation has been brewing since August, according to co-author Chris Dayas’s Twitter timeline. Starting 20 August:

My PhD student who was so excited to attend her first SFN has been denied a visa to enter US based on her nationality... very helpful to progress science in all countries and break down barriers

On 8 September:

Disappointed that @Neurosci2018 @SfNtweets won’t refund my students membership to use at another conference in a country that won’t deny her entry based on her citizenship.... I asked nicely twice ....

On 20 September:

I just spoke with the Executive Director of SFN. He explained SFN's position re membership to SFN V meeting registration i.e. Thus, although she joined solely for attending the meeting only the latter would have been refunded based on her VISA denial @SfNtweets @Neurosci2018

(I’m a little disturbed that the student is almost erased in this discussion. Her name doesn’t appear on by her picture or her words, and Daya never refers to her by name in his tweets. I am guessing she is the first author, L. Akbari.)

This was not unique. Moataz Assem wrote:

It's not just Iran, my turkish wife also didn't get the visa to present her poster. it sucks.

The Lim Lab tweeted:

So far we’ve seen many withdrawan posters due to the travel ban, at #sfn2018. Add many more who even didn’t bother to submit since they knew they won’t be able to attend. This needs to be addressed by @SfNtweets. Stand by #ScienceForAll #NoBanInScience #NoDiscriminationInScience

Matthew Leavitt has a spreadsheet to collect the names of neuroscientists affected by the ban. I’d also point out that this blog recently featured another story of a denied visa.

But back to the poster, and why it is so effective. Click to enlarge!

I’ve seen notices of withdrawn posters before. Usually, someone sticks a page of letter-sized paper with a hand-written note explaining that the poster has been withdrawn. It gets no attention. Making a full-sized poster of the fact that there is no poster has gotten attention.

And it’s not just the “no poster” aspect that gets attention. This is a smart design.

First, you have a bunch of question marks in the left hand side, where people will look first. Any viewer would be wondering why there is not a typical poster with boxes and graphs and data to see here. The image acknowledges, “Look, I know you’re confused. Let me explain.”

Second, the image fades pretty quickly to black around the sides. Black is often used to represent censorship, whether by black redacted lines in text or the word “blackout” itself.

Third, the message from the author is placed on the right, the “bottom line” area. It’s placed at eye level, against the darkest part of the poster so it pops out.

Fourth, when you look closer, you can see the outline of a poster underneath. A scientific ghost of what could have been, which drives home the frustration that there was something ready to go, that could have been presented.

If the author had been slated to give a talk, what could have been the equivalent statement? The session chair would have just said, “The speaker cannot come because of the travel ban. We’ll resume in fifteen minutes.” Even if a co-author would have put up a slide like this poster for those fifteen minutes, nobody would have paid attention. People would have carried on with their business, going to another talk or checking their email while they waited for the next one.

This poster makes a point better than any talk.

Posters have been used for political purposes far longer than they have been used for academic communication.This poster harkens back to that earlier and more common use.

Photos by Lionel Rodriguez, Chris Dayas (poster co-author) and Fergil Mills.

Related posts

Critique: Virtual conferencing

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Critique: Digitized manuscripts

November 15, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Critique: Stimulating brain to lower pain

≪ Previous: Blackout: Poster protests travel ban

This blog mostly uses sciences as examples, so I am always positively delighted when I get contributions from the humanities. Today’s contribution is from Cornelius van Lit. Click to enlarge!

One of the things like about getting other people’s posters is they try stuff I would never do. I’d never put my title in the middle of the poster. And yet, it works here.

The poster is a great example use of using size to indicate reading priority. That large text in the middle makes it very clear where you are supposed to start reading. Nothing competes with that title.

The downside of having the title in the middle is that there is some potential confusion about how you are supposed to read the remaining text. But it’s okay here. After reading the middle introduction, people will jump up to the upper left corner (which starts “Scholars use digitized manuscripts...”) because that’s just where you look first when you read English.

After reading that section, I think most people will read across to the top right (which starts, “In one chapter...”), because of the proximity of the text. Having that big title in the middle stops you from looking down and trying to read in columns. If the title and introduction were at the top, people would get lost. (But with only four sections, they wouldn’t get lost long.)

I tried making two changes, both subtle, in the revision below.

First, I moved the author information and the QR code from the top of the poster to the bottom. I really didn’t like how the QR code was sitting “corner to corner” in the first version, so I lined it up with the map below. Besides, both bits of material looked like “fine print,” and fine print is more logically placed at the bottom. It might also be easier for shorter people to scan the QR code if it’s lower rather than higher on the poster.

Second, I added a very subtle neatline around the map in the lower left corner. (You may have to enlarge to see it.) Three sides of the map have segments with clear straight edges, but the left side doesn’t, making the map a strange, irregular shape. By using a thin, light gray line, the shape of the map becomes more consistent with the shapes in the other three corners.

External links

Among digitized manuscripts

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Critique: Stimulating brain to lower pain

November 22, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Link roundup for November, 2018

≪ Previous: Critique: Digitized manuscripts

Today’s poster comes from kindly contributor Emma Taylor, who was generous enough to share her honours project. Click to enlarge!

Quick thoughts.

Good structure that lets me know I read in rows.
Visual hierarchy is generally good.
Looks crowded. Would benefit from more space around everything, but particularly between text and edged of blue boxes they are in.
Underlining text in discussion would probably be better as bold or italic text.
Another editing run to cut more text might help. (I know, that bit is hard.)

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Link roundup for November, 2018

November 29, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Critique and makeover: Buffer it out

≪ Previous: Critique: Stimulating brain to lower pain

This month’s contender for “Best conference poster” was spotted by Greg Fell:

Clever!

• • • • •

If you have a fabric poster, Crystal Lantz can show you how to turn that ol’ science communication into a lovely tote bag!

She’s got detailed instructions, but you’re on your own for the sewing machine. Hat tip to Crystal Lantz and Caitlin verder Weele.

• • • • •

I missed these tweets from Suzy Styles about poster club back in August, when there was discussion about harassment in poster sessions:

The First Rule of Poster Club is...
🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do 🤛🏻not 🤛🏻 talk🤛🏻about...
🤛🏻the presenter’s appearance
🤛🏻the presenter’s phone number
🤛🏻who you think ‘actually’ wrote the code
🤛🏻basically anything other than the poster and relevant scientific context 🤷🏻‍♀️

The Second Rule of Poster Club is...
🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do🤛🏻not
🤛🏻try to look down the presenter’s top
🤛🏻stand unnecessarily close
🤛🏻touch the presenter 🙅🏻
🤛🏻block the presenter with your body
🤛🏻talk about anything other than the poster and relevant scientific context

The Third Rule of Poster Club is...
🤛🏻be aware that if you are much taller, standing close can be intimidating
🤛🏻be aware that if you are more senior, standing close can be intimidating
🤛🏻check - am I being a jerk atm?
🤛🏻do not talk about anything other than the poster++

• • • • •

Phylopic is a great resource for biology presenters. It provides silhouettes of different animals. I tried, “Crab.”

Weirdly, I tried clicking Callinectes sapidus, which has an icon next to its name, and found there was no image of that species! But with a little more clicking, it provided this outline of Liocarcinus vernalis.

The “illustrated lineage” feature is also pretty nice. Hat tip to John Vanek.

• • • • •

More conferences should use magnetic name badges, says Jennifer Rohn.

OMG - a magnetic name badge so you don’t have to pierce your expensive clothes! Where have you been all my life?

• • • • •

This blog post mainly about bootstraps (in the mathematical sense) but also contains warnings against the problems of bar graphs and error bars.

(T)here is no substitute for a scatterplot, at least for relatively small sample sizes. Also, using the mean +/- SD, +/- SEM, with a classic confidence interval (using t formula) or with a percentile bootstrap confidence interval can provide very different impressions about the spread in the data (although it is not their primary objective).

• • • • •

John Burn-Murdoch has a nice analysis of this wide-distributed graphic of US election results.

With that constraint gone, you can label them all directly! Immediately more readable.

• • • • •

Kathleen Morris gives us a list of free graphics resources.

Hat tip to Lisa Lundgren and Emily Rollinson

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Critique and makeover: Buffer it out

December 6, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Lessons from battle scenes: It’s all about the build-up

≪ Previous: Link roundup for November, 2018

Today's poster is a contribution from William Elaban. This was not for a conference, but a class. Click to enlarge!

Now, I have to apologize to William here, because my first reaction to this poster is not a kind one. But sometimes, my first reaction to a poster is:

“Blow it up. Blow it all up. Blow it all up and start again.”

This poster has deep structural issues. There is too much text. The reading order is all over the place. When the problems are that big, you want to see a fresh page.

But first impressions can lie. Then I calm down and start tinkering. And by following some of the usual design principles, the poster slowly but steadily gets better.

The first thing I did was get rid of lines. Underlined text and boxes were immediately banished. Headline case was replaced with sentence case.

Next, I tackled the table. I gave it a more standard format, with just horizontal lines separating the top, header, and bottom. I cut the large number of decimal places down to a more reasonable three.

Getting rid of the long numbers in the table made it more compact. I started pushing the elements around so I could line up the left edge of the table with the text blocks above. I did the same with the figure on the right. Columns started to take shape.

All the headings were made bold.

The text was a mix of Calibri and Arial, so I made it all Arial. I continued to try to make the text the same point size whenever possible.

I justified the text blocks to emphasize that things are aligned on the page now instead of scattered higgildy piggildy.

The deep problems remain – to get rid of those you really do have to blow it up and start again. But I’ll be darned if the poster doesn’t look noticeably better. And there isn’t anything complicated about what I did here. It mostly boiled down to:

Get rid of lines and boxes.
Line things up.
Put space between things.
Make the text consistent.

Sometimes, I’m kind of amazed by how much the appearance of a poster can improve with simple fixes. It’s not crazy complex stuff. It’s like how getting a good haircut and a little makeup can take years off someone’s apparent age.

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Lessons from battle scenes: It’s all about the build-up

December 13, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Should we train all students in graphic design?

≪ Previous: Critique and makeover: Buffer it out

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers features a fantastic battle scene: the battle for Helm’s Deep. There’s a lot of reasons why it works. The scale and physicality of it is awesome. But there is one factor that is underrated.

In the DVD commentary, director Peter Jackson talked about watching famous sieges and battles of film, like Zulu. He said that what he learned from those was that the secret was all in the build-up.

The movie spends a lot of time making sure that the audience understands the situation. The fortress is literally set against a mountain, creating the impression of “backs against the wall.” The city is outnumbered, with hundreds of defenders against thousands of attackers.

And you see that army of thousands marching in. Not doing anything at first. Just standing there. Then thumping their spears and yelling.

More waiting.

And then the army charges and all hell breaks loose and it is on. And when those orc charge and start throwing ladders up against the fortress walls, you are invested and ready to see what happens next.

The battle itself is only about ten minutes of film. It would have been easy to not show the orcs doing their “haka” and charge into the action, particularly in a movie that asks you to stay in your seat as long as the Lord of the Rings films do.

On a poster, the Results section is like the action part of the battle, when arrows are flying, axes are wielded, and explosions are going off. Too many poster makers want to charge into the action. Many poster presenters want to get to the stuff they find exciting as soon as possible.

But an audience member has to care. They need the set up. They need to know what the stakes are. They need to know the landscape the project is set in.

That means you should spend a lot of time thinking about the first part of your poster. This is important both in the design of your poster, and how you are going to talk about your poster. How are you going to bring someone who has never thought about your subject on board and interested in the outcome?

By telling them what the conflict is. By telling them the complication you are trying to solve. By setting up a scenario, then throwing in a “But...” moment. You have to be crystal clear in that introduction. If you can do that, people will follow you through the battle to see the resolution.

External links

15 years later, no one’s matched LOTR’s Battle at Helm’s Deep

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Should we train all students in graphic design?

December 20, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Link round-up for December, 2018

≪ Previous: Lessons from battle scenes: It’s all about the build-up

This blog exists to help solve a problem: that academic conference posters are ugly. But I am under no illusions that this blog is going to fix the problem. So, what would move the dial the quality of conference posters?

When faced with this kind of question, I often see people say, “We should include this in our training for students!”

As an educator, I never want to be the person to say we shouldn’t train students. I’ve done it myself, often. I support this sentiment, but I’m wary of calls for “more training,” for two reasons.

First, suggestions for “more training” make me worry about mission creep. Over time, I’ve heard that students need more training in statistics. And in writing. And in ethics. And in grantsmanship. And in social media. And diversity issues. And in dealing with media. And in public outreach. And so on.

Don’t get me wrong, these are all worthy topics where I think training would be beneficial. But there is only so much we can realistically expect to make students competent in during their time in our programs. It’s hard enough to attain competence and eventual mastery in one discipline.

Second, graphic design is a professional skill that takes years of study and practice. “Training” research students in graphic design would probably end up being a few credit hours over a multi-year program, taught by a non-professional (e.g., a research scientist in the department who is smart enough not to use Comic Sans but never took a class in design) rather than a skilled graphic designer (e.g., someone from over in an art department who does this on a daily basis). (And I say that as someone who has been asked to do those kinds of classes and workshops. I mean, I’m that guy!) I worry that calling for training could trivialize the skills needed for excellent design and become a curricular box-checking exercise.

Instead of expecting academics to become one person bands, we should try to create more access and respect for experts in other fields and be willing to use them, credit them, and pay them.

Picture from randychiu on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

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Link round-up for December, 2018

December 27, 2018, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Critque and ruination: Antibiotic resistance CARD

≪ Previous: Should we train all students in graphic design?

It’s a small link round-up for this holiday season, but I have one I want to share, particularly given that last week’s post was musing about how we train students in graphic design.

This article talks about teaching data visualization to kids. Fourth grade students, in fact. That’s what makes it a perfect holiday post, because kids love holidays. Or something.

We might be taught how to read line, bar, and pie charts in elementary school because they have been around longer than others and are used the most. ... I’m not foolish enough to think I could teach 30 kids an array of new graphs in one afternoon, but I could at least help them understand that there’s more to the world than line, bar, and pie charts.

The post also talks about a Match-It game for data visualization that looks interesting.

And for a lighter touch, here’s a graphic artist’s breakdown of all the Marvel movie posters.

That wraps up the year for the blog. Next year will be big for this blog. I have some very cool things in the work in the coming months!

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Critque and ruination: Antibiotic resistance CARD

January 3, 2019, 5:00 am

≫ Next: When posters fail

≪ Previous: Link round-up for December, 2018

For the first blog post of the year, allow me to ruin a poster.

This week’s contribution came from Sally Min. Click to enlarge!

When I first opened the file, I thought, “This is strong.” We have that intense White Stripes colour scheme. The diagonals add a lot of visual interest and make the poster look different than the usual rectangular format. There is not a lot to read, because the poster uses icons flow charts effectively.

But those diagonals, which bring so much of the cool look to the poster, also mess with the poster.

They look like arrow heads. We expect to follow arrows.

At a glance, this is how I expect the order of stuff on the poster to flow.

But the numbers make is clear that this is the order the authors intended.

Because those numbers are so helpful, it might be worth making them bigger or more prominent somehow. Maybe numbers inside bullets would make them more visible. Here’s a very quick and dirty version:

While I know intellectually what the problem is, I don’t know how to fix it in a way that doesn’t make the poster look worse.

My first thought was, “The top row is confusing. It looks like there is an arrow pointing right to left, from black section 2 to the red section 1. I’ll keep the diagonals, but reverse it so the implied arrow is consistent with the reading order.”

I tried that, but you have the same problem with the diagonals looking like arrow on the right side of the section 4, which pointed across to section 6, when the authors want you to go down to black section 5.

I tried to create a visual cue, another arrowhead made of diagonals, to show the authors preferred direction, and that’s a hot mess. The shape created by black section 5 is just a weird polygon that makes no sense.

Maybe the solution is to flip the content. Put the material in black section 5 where red section 6 currently is, and vice versa.

I think this style of design could work, but the back and forth reading flow would need to be built in at the beginning. Something like:

You end up with “half boxes,” which in this sketch I’ve used for fine print.

The thing is that after all this struggling, I’m actually not sure it matters much. This is still a shapr looking poster, and that the authors were smart enough to add the explicit guideposts by numbering each section means that I am only momentarily confused looking at the poster.

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When posters fail

January 10, 2019, 9:14 am

≫ Next: Critique: Lending low tech tools

≪ Previous: Critque and ruination: Antibiotic resistance CARD

When a poster fails, it’s usually because it failed early in the design process.

Years ago, I showed this poster:

Poster overflowing poster board and spilling onto floor

It does not matter whether this poster does a lot of the detail work right. It does not matter how good the layout is, or how good the typography is, or whether the colour scheme is consistent and pleasing to the eye, or whether there is enough white space. None of that matters.

The authors of this poster doomed it at the very beginning, when they picked a page size... and got it wrong.

In my experience, there are two places where posters fail early on.

On the content side, people do not edit enough. They want to include everything, rather than focusing on one thing, and the poster suffers.

On the design side, people do not make a grid. They start drawing boxes without any underlying thought to structure, and treat their data like some sort of jigsaw puzzle to fit together.

I was reminded of the while I was making a poster for the Student and Post-Doctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC) for the recent Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in Tampa (#SICB2019 on Twitter).

This poster was not a typical data-driven poster. Authorship was on my mind, and I wanted to do some consciousness raising about this issue to early career researchers.

What struck me was how little the poster changed from beginning to end. You can see this in the animation:

Animation of SICB authorship poster creation

Here are a few frames from that process. I had created a six column grid template for a poster class I was doing for SPDAC:

I decided to used that as a basis for a three column layout. And I what kind of graphic I wanted*. And those were apparent in the very first stages of layout, shown below:

Even as the poster is filling out, the underlying structure stays the same:

And here is the final version:

Looking at it now, I should have made the title bigger. Oh well.

I have noticed a similar pattern when I’ve created animations of my design process before (here and here). This first one from 2015 keeps the same five column structure throughout the design process. A second one (from 2017) has a little more movement early on, but quickly settles down.

While you can see in the animations that a lot of time is spent tinkering. But the late stage tinkering is the polish that will differentiate the “okay” from the “excellent.”

It’s the early stage decisions that make the difference between “competent” and “embarrassing,” “okay” and “crap,” “success” and “fail.”

* From this blog post:

(T)wo chess pieces suggest conflict. But if you know how knights move in chess, the reality is that neither can capture the other. In other words, from the point of view of those pieces, it’s a “no win” situation.
I think that represents most authorship disputes pretty well.

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Critique: Lending low tech tools

January 17, 2019, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Poster sessions for wheelchair users

≪ Previous: When posters fail

Today’s poster contributor is Scott Johnson. Click to enlarge!

This is a great marriage of content and form. The content is about something that is unabashedly “low tech,” so the hand-written, slightly lo-fi (okay, low tech) look is completely right here. It adds character and interest.

Regular readers know that I personally am anti-underlining, and try to remove it in almost every instance I see it. But here, because it’s hand written, I can see the case for it. When people write by hand, they do underline for emphasis. I would experiment a bit with removing the underline, but I don’t know if removing the the underlines for headings and making the headinga a bit bolder would lose the look.

I appreciate the purity of the monochrome greyscale, but it does wash out from a distance.

I would like to see a little colour – even if subdued, and not everywhere. To keep the “low tech” look, I would suggest referencing some old photos, like daguerreotypes. They often weren’t pure shades of grey – certainly not as pure as here. Old pictures often have creamy or brownish overtones to them, as you can see in this picture of American write Edgar Allen Poe.

Making the background of the page a subtle shade off-white or something might help.

Alternately, the poster might use a single colour to highlight a few elements, like duotone printing.
I'm thinking of maybe a very light yellow for the “sunburst” behind the building.

If the poster stays pure monochrome, it could use a little more contrast to make some portions stand out. I like how the lines around the house and title are heavier to make them stand out at distance. But the text, as mentioned, is fading a little.

Very charming work!

Picture from here.

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Poster sessions for wheelchair users

January 24, 2019, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Link round-up for January 2019

≪ Previous: Critique: Lending low tech tools

Amy-Charlotte Devitz and service dog Fisher in front of a “Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology" sign.

I’ve visited the issue of poster accessibility on this blog, but mainly in the context of visual issues, like colour blindness and dyslexia. Of course, these are not the only challenges the people might face attending a scientific conference. Amy-Charlotte Devitz, a.k.a. The Bendy Biologist on Twitter, has a great blog post talking about navigating a scientific conference in a wheelchair with a service dog. The conference at hand is the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting this month in Tampa, Florida.

Here’s an excerpt, focusing in on what she says about poster sessions (emphasis added).

100+ posters were on display and you had a chance to interact with those who had made them. These were admittedly a bit of a challenge to navigate in a chair. It was crowded, meaning it was very hard to move around, and with so many people around I wasn’t able to get a proper look at many of the posters. The alternative was to come and look at the posters before the official sessions started, a time when very few people were present, so I did this often. The downside of this was that one, the presenters weren’t there to speak with and two, it meant skipping other events to come look at the posters. Improvements in accessibility could be made by the increasing the space between rows of posters as well as the posters themselves to open things up a bit. This may be limited by the space available in the venue, but it something to consider.

As I said in the beginning, my focus in this post would be on accessibility for individuals for mobility impairments, but I have a few points left to make. For one, almost every talk I saw used color-blind friendly color palettes in making their slides, and most used large fonts that were easy to read even from the back of the room. Encouraging these in all talks and posters would assure someone colorblind or visually impaired could view any material.

Full disclosure: I was the chair of the Student and Post-Doctoral Affairs Committee during this meeting, so I have a professional interest here above and beyond the usual. I was supposed to attend this meeting, but could not due to unexpected events.

It’s worth noting that SICB’s poster sessions used to allow people to have eight foot posters. Here’s one from 2017. In 2018, this was reduced to less than four feet of space for a poster. I do not know how far apart the poster boards were placed in those years, but it seems likely that the square footage of poster viewing space was probably about halved by this move.

That square footage of viewing space is extremely important for wheelchair users. Whatever reasons there are for shrinking the poster size (and there are probably reasonable ones), this does not change the fact that it virtually guarantees that the poster session is a worse experience for everyone, even if wheelchair users are a little more affected than most.

There is a lot more in Charlotte’s post, and I recommend it highly to you.

External links

SICB 2019 – An accessibility perspective

↧

Link round-up for January 2019

January 31, 2019, 5:00 am

≫ Next: It’s dangerous to go alone! Getting help from campus offices and staff

≪ Previous: Poster sessions for wheelchair users

Very helpful article about how to pick two typefaces that complement each other,

Almost every text-based layout will benefit from more than one typeface. ... With the right pairing, your typography will instantly appear more professional, polished, and attractive.

• • • • •
Kaoru Sakabe discusses best practices in figure assembly.

Hat tip to ASBMB.

• • • • •
Brent Thorne has help for R users:

Do you like #RMarkdown but also need to make a conference poster? Well, the posterdown 📦 has been updated to include: fully customised colour options, sizing of your #PDF conference poster, and automated citation generation🙃🎉 Check it out here.

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A listicle on the eight most popular types of posters says this about conference style posters:

What makes educational or research posters different is that most posters are very visually pleasing to the eye and rely on composition and aesthetic qualities while educational ones often rely on information and presenting a resumed version of the research. Notice that the entire scientific process of the research seems to be resumed in the academic poster above.

This is a very round about way of saying, “Damn, you ugly!”

Sigh. Just another reason this blog won’t be going out of business any time soon.

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It’s dangerous to go alone! Getting help from campus offices and staff

February 7, 2019, 5:00 am

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Sometimes, we academics believe that we have to do everything ourselves. We have to write, teach, research, analyze, manage, lead, critique, and design.

Consequently, people are far too likely to take “do it yourself” (DIY) approach to poster design. This leads to people searching the web and grabbing crummy, low resolution images instead of figuring out better alternatives.

We forget that our campuses have professionals who can help us with some tasks. It’s easy to forget because often those staffers have more contact with administration than faculty and students.

For example, lots of campuses have offices and staff that can help with:

Oversized printing. As the cost of plotter printers has come down, more campuses have one somewhere on that can be used for printing posters instead of sending them to professional printers and having to ship them back to campus.

Graphics. Who do you think makes all those campus fliers and promotional material? These offices are sometimes in university relations or news or some other place, but most universities are going to have staff tucked away somewhere who are busy creating the look of documents the university puts out. And let’s admit that universities put out a lot of documents.

Some bigger campuses have their own campus press, with people who are experienced in technical printing and design (though perhaps not large format documents).

Photography. Again, universities are always needing photos of events for news and promotion, and and have photographers on staff. They are often looking for shots of faculty and students doing stuff. Contacting a staff photographer might be a great way to get a compelling visual for your poster.

I would love to have a photograph as striking as this one on my poster. Click to enlarge (it’s big)!

Photograph of researchers on dried, cracked mud

This photo was taken by David Pike, a photographer on my university. I don’t think this is the sort of image that a professor or grad student taking a few snapshots with their smartphone would be able to make very often.

I could easily see this sort of dramatic image as the centerpiece for a big conference poster.

Admittedly, offices and staff vary. I’ve been in some universities where there were dedicated staff photographers in the department, while at others, you have to go to another office some where across campus. Some are easy to collaborate with. Some are a little more reluctant, since they have their own work to do. And some get in the way more than help, more interested in maintaining the university’s branding than design that is suited for the task.

They may be other offices and staffer who can lend a hand if you poke your nose around and ask.

Related posts

Finding photos
Misplaced priorities on institutional templates

Photo by UTRGV photograph David Pike. Hat tip to him for prompting this post.

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A decade of Better Posters

March 1, 2019, 5:00 am

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It has been a decade since I started this blog. It had a slow start, but it has turned into one of the most successful, and rewarding, projects of my career.

Thank you.

To readers who have shown me that this is helpful, thank you.

To those who have recommended the blog to others, thank you.

To contributors who have been generous enough to share your posters with me and blog readers, a big thank you.You have made it much easier for this blog to continue by always giving me new things to talk about.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention that a book about poster design is coming. A book written by me, published by Pelagic Publishing.

Before I committed to writing a poster book, I needed to be sure it would provide value above and beyond what the blog already does. I’ve always felt there needs to be a reason for writing a book for academics. I see a lot of books (particularly textbooks) that don’t provide much different than others in the field. I never wanted to write a book “just because.”

But I think there is a good reason for a book.

Many colleagues have told me they recommend this blog to others, particularly to students doing their first poster. While I’m glad so many put trust the suggestions here, I’ve been very aware that this blog is not terribly helpful to a novice. It’s not fair to expect a new person to trawl through ten years of blog posts that have no organization beyond “What I happened to want to write about that week” to get a sense of how to put together a poster.

A book can provide coherent “start to finish” advice that this blog can’t.

In the meantime, the blog will continue with its weekly^* schedule, with new posts on Thursdays.

^* Well, almost weekly. I’ve missed a few weeks here and there.

Photo by Justin S. Campbell on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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Critique: Virus stamping

March 7, 2019, 1:45 pm

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Today’s poster comes from contributor Benjamin Wu. Click to enlarge!

Ben and I talked about capitalization, particularly in the title. There are three styles: headline / title casing (on left below), sentence casing (right), and all capitals. (The example above is not a good example for a poster, because the title is the same size as the main text. You wouldn’t have on a poster title.)

I see examples of all three on posters all the time. I’m not a fan of all capitals, because it looks shouty, like a Hulk or Dalek Twitter account.

I lean towards sentence casing, because we read sentences all the time. It makes it easier to recognize proper nouns. But proper nouns (name of person, place, or thing) should always be capitalized in any case!

The poster’s layout is clean, with consistent space between boxes both horizontally and vertically.

The left quarter of the poster is mostly taken up with an abstract, and it is killing me. Having any abstract is bad enough, but this one is worse than most. It’s a structured abstract. I love structured abstracts for journals, but they are horrible for posters, because breaking the abstract into sections makes it longer and even more redundant than usual. When I look at the poster and see that huge block of text, and my will to read the rest of the poster just shrivels.

In fairness, Ben informed me that the decision to include the abstract was not up to him.

But if you can get past the abstract, the rest of the poster fares well. The introduction is short and snappy, and the central two columns contains lots of well constructed graphics to outline the methods.

I like the discipline of the predominantly greyscale palette, but I worry a little about the contrast making the text difficult to read. I tried lightening the boxes, but not all the way to white:

Lightening the fills in the boxes make the headings stand out a bit more. I like the use of bands to highlight the heading for each box. The headings are unusually consistent in their position for a poster made in PowerPoint.

A fine poster, but it is kind of a shame about that abstract.

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Critique: Float like a butterfly, think like a bee

March 14, 2019, 5:00 am

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This week’s poster comes from Jeremy Hemberger. I believe that this was presented at last year’s Entomological Society of America meeting. Click to enlarge!

Jeremy writes that the graphic design parts were done in Illustrator. All the pieces were then assembled using inDesign.

I love the relaxed feel of this poster. One of the things that helps tremendously is that it very consciously and deliberately shows how it is not trying to fill all the available space. The bottom quarter or so of the poster contains a couple of logos (appropriately tucked down in the corner) and some simple, inviting artwork. And even between the two of those, there is a big space in light blue that is comfortable just holding space and doing nothing else.

It’s kind of a glorious signal of confidence. More stuff would look desperate.

I like how the title is broken down in a a simple, highlighted phrase on the left, and a smaller subtitle over on the right.

I haven’t seen author information handled this way before. Author photos are a tricky thing, but these are good pictures. Having them in a circle both minimizes their footprint and adds a little visual interest. There’s no affiliations here, just contact information, which is arguably the most important thing to a viewer. This approach might not work well with large numbers of authors, but this shows it works well with one or two.

The poster’s headings also show confidence in not using the typical “IMRAD” format. Instead, the headings clearly divide the space into “Problem,” “Solution,” and “Visualization and outreach.” The heading parallel the title, using the same left / right divide to separate a short, simple heading and a smaller, slightly more complex subheading.

The flow chart / infographic is concise, visually appealing, and well thought out.

The one place that I might suggest some very mild revision is in the text. Some of the text suffers from classic academic wordiness. The first sentence and filler words like “Indeed”, “are known to be”, and ”As such” might be edited out.

The type used for the paragraph text is condensed and a slightly heavy weight. It is a little small and difficult to read from a distance. But then, I say this as someone who has an optometrist appointment today. The older I get, the more I appreciate the need for things on posters to be big.

Fine work all around.

Related posts

Mug shot

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Design within size limits.

Keep crops in mind.

Use animation if appropriate.

Edit yourself ruthlessly.

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