The world’s best data visualizations are a team effort
I was recently listening to an older episode of Jon Schwabish’s PolicyViz podcast with Edward Tufte. Tufte’s books influenced a lot of my thinking about topics here on the blog. I cite some of his...
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Review: Better Data Visulizations
I ran across Jon Schwabish’s book, Better Data Visualizations, when my editor pointed out how uncomfortably close it looked to an unused cover design for Better Posters.Once I finished smiling at the...
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Critique: Note-taking, or, “What did I just read?”
This poster is courtesy of Emily Goblirsch, presented at the Arizona Psychology Undergraduate Research conference (AZPURC). Click to enlarge!I like how the subject of the poster, writing and...
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Review: How Design Makes the World
Note: Author Scott Berkun recently announced to his email subscribers that he has had a medical event that has seriously affected his voice. This is a concerning set back for someone who makes a living...
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Link roundup for July 2021
Animate Your Science has a gallery of four excellent conference posters. They even go so far as to call them the “best” posters! The post has a nice little evaluation checklist:First...
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Critique: Frog parasites
This week’s work comes from Anneke Schoemanan. This was created for British Society of Parasitology (BSP) Parasites Online 2021. Click to enlarge!The influence of the billboard poster is evident here,...
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How is a conference poster like a joke?
It’s probably hard for people who grew up with pervasive Internet to understand that newspaper comics were important cultural touchstones for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most successful...
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Critique: Bioremediation in the Philippines
Today’s poster comes from Vladamir William. It was presented at 2021 De La Salle University Research Congress in the Philippines back in July. Click to enlarge!There is also a video presenting the...
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Link roundup for August 2021
Congrats to all the winners of the Royal Astronomical Society poster competitions!You can find the work in the linked thread above. But I’m featuring Jo Ramasawmy’s poster because she was super nice...
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What is the carbon footprint of a conference poster?
The COVID-19 crisis delivered a shock to the academic conference scene from which it may never recover. We have seen conferences completely retooled and reformatted in a very short span of time, with...
View ArticleYouTube data has lessons for poster creators, or: Too legit to click
In the Better Posters book, I wrote about how poster makers could learn lessons from advertising. Advertisers have clear metrics of whether a headline is effective or not: cold hard cash dollars. 💰This...
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Same research, different presentation: Lessons from Nature
It’s instructive to look at how academics present their results compared to journalists. Compare!Original article title:“He who pays the piper calls the tune”: Researcher experiences of funder...
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Critique: Soil ontologies
Today’s poster comes from Nicolas Le Guillarme. This was presented at the S4Biodiv workshop. As always, you can click to enlarge!My first reaction was, "Ooh, this is really nice.” The bold use of...
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Deliver more, not less
A common thing people say about poster design is the old adage, “Less is more.” The phrase probably originated in Robert Browning’s poem, “Andrea del Sarto.”Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged....
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Link roundup for September 2021
Look, we’re scientists, not artists, and rats are hard to draw so you might just have to settle for a rat made out of ovals. This is the lead example in this great Twitter thread on scientists making...
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“Ooh, it’s the one with...”
Years ago, the BBC website for Doctor Who had a “memory jogger” to help viewers recall the title of some episode. (Still online, in fact!) After all, the original classic show had run over 25 years and...
View ArticleTen simple rules for conference posters
I am being a lazy blogger and turning a Twitter thread into a blog post. John Butler asked for, “Something like 10 steps for a good conference poster.”So I made something up off the top of my head....
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Link roundup for October 2021
I’ve cautioned against outdoor poster sessions before. They always seem to me to be Just Asking For Trouble™. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, outdoors is safer than indoors, so...This looks lovely. But...
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A report from Neuroscience 2021, one the biggest poster sessions in the world
Monday, 8 November 2021: From the online meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021 meeting:Elizabeth West tweeted, “You misspelled ‘everything.’” Neuroscience this year was originally announced as...
View ArticleWhy conference posters should be peer reviewed
Lander Foquet has a worrying Twitter thread about how a poster abstract – no even a whole poster, just an abstract – is making the rounds in the medical disinformation circles. Foquet says “a poster is...
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