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Critique double feature: Grunge vision
This week’s contributions come from Martin Rolfs. He’s kindly permitting me to show not one, but two posters. Click to enlarge!This one was presented at the 2014 Vision Sciences Society meeting in St....
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Worst poster viewer
“I don’t have a question so much as a comment...”Dave Levitan at Slate looks at the phenomenon of why people use question time at the end of presentations to not ask questions. “My question is the...
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Let anarchy reign!
Sometimes, people tell me, “I can’t follow the advice you have in the blog. There’s an institutional poster template, and they make me use it.” My first reaction is usually, “Who will stop you?”Who is...
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Lessons from Skin Wars: Have a focal point
I’ve been catching up with a show called Skin Wars on Hulu (new season coming on Game Show Network in April). It’s a competition reality show along the lines of Project Runway, Top Chef, and FaceOff:...
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Link roundup for March 2016
I have to lead with Jeremy Fox on the Dynamic Ecology blog, which tells you a big mistake almost every poster makes:The post actually said too much text, but you get the point. (And thanks for the plug...
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The poster to publication puzzle (With stats and graphs and everything!)
How many conference posters turn into published papers?It’s not a trivial question. A huge amount of scientific information is presented at conferences. Scientific conferences should be the places to...
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Critique and makeover: Gene sequence toolkit
This week’s poster is from Kasey Pham, and is used with permission. Click to enlarge!Kasey writes:I’m a student having a little trouble with my first poster presentation. I’d like to cut down the text...
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Been there, done that... but couldn’t get the T-shirt
Cathy Newman pointed out that this year’s Evolution meeting in Austin has conference T-shirts... but none in women’s styles.Sigh.Weirdly, this is a choice you have a pre-registration, months out from...
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Critique: Red ware
This week’s contribution comes from Scott Van Keuren. This poster recently graced the halls of the Society for American Archaeology meeting.Click to enlarge!This a poster that has the right ideas, but...
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Link roundup for April 2016
Lisa Rost has a nice overview of colour tools to help with data visualizations. Some have appeared on the blog before, but this is a great summary.MarkMaker bills itself as an automated logo designer...
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The inverse colour intensity rule
Colour on a poster is powerful, but can be difficult to use well. One of the problems I often see is that people create posters with deep, bright, saturated colours that cover large areas:It’s hard to...
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Four simple tips for shortening your poster
Few things will turn away a potential poster viewer like long paragraphs of text. So one of the recommendations I (and many others) make for posters is to write less stuff. But it is not easy. There’s...
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The problem with point size
“What’s the smallest point size you can put on a poster?”This is a common question, but it’s not one that has a simple answer.I know many scientists read this blog, and scientists work in a world where...
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Link roundup for May 2016
Matthew wins for best poster design cartoon this month:You can see more of his cartoons at Errant Science. His inspiration for this one?Just looked at a draft of a poster, there was text in size 2...
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Critique: Notorious DRG
This week’s contribution is from Zach Sperry, who gave me permission to share his poster from the 2015 Neuroscience meeting. Click to enlarge!Nobody should be embarrassed by a poster like this. The...
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What is the “ePoster” format?
I’ve been predicting that we’re going to see a slow decline in paper posters for a while, so I was interested when John Coupland and Lady Scientist drew my attention to the joint annual meeting of...
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Search engines for technical graphics
How important are academic graphics? A new pre-print in arXiv argues, “Pretty damn important.” This news summary of the technical article says:(T)heir most remarkable discovery is that the most...
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The view from the floor at Evolution 2016
Earlier this week, I was at the 2016 Evolution meeting in Austin, Texas. The poster sessions ran for three nights, two hours a night, and I glanced at every single poster.The conference organizers...
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Link round-up for June 2016
Kaitlyn Werner is the winner of this month’s “Best re-use of a conference poster (beach edition)”:Alex Barnard took a poster into the third dimension with 3-D printing:This is not the first time I’ve...
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Critique: Anther colours
I won’t say this is the best poster from the recent Evolution 2016 meeting, but it is my personal favourite. Click to enlarge!This poster is by Emily Austen, who was kind enough to send me the PDF and...
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