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“This can’t be real, can it?” Oh, this poster is real and it is something to...
You need to click to enlarge to truly appreciate what is going on in this poster.What you see above is a poster by Manolis Kellis that was being presented at The Biology of Genomes meeting (#BoG22) at...
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Poster sessions for your course
When I was on the Lecture Breakers podcast (episode 121), I talked to Barbi Honeycutt about how to use posters in a higher education I wanted to follow up and talk a little more about how to pull...
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The Scholarly Communication podcast
I’m fortunate enough to be on the Scholarly Communication podcast with Daniel Shea! (I think it’s episode 91, but they don’t number them by default.)While the ostensible reason I was on was to talk...
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Is the future of posters a bunch of big screens?
Paul Bracher (ChemBark) sent a message from the Astrobiology Science Conference (#AbSciCon22 on Twitter) conference that seems to have come close to getting an electronic poster session right. The...
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Listing authors: Lessons from movie posters
Movie posters have very different goals than academic conference posters. But both increasingly have one thing in common: they have to fit a lot of contributors into a limited space.Here’s a recent...
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Link round-up for May 2022
Lots of great posters shown in winners of the 12th International Meeting on Visualizing Biological Data. Special congratulations to Mol Mir for the Best Scientific Poster award with this:Excellent use...
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“Rage quit” and poster designs
In an upcoming interview for the Scholarly Communications podcast, I was reminded of an argument I made in the Better Posters book about relevance.What someone thinks is “relevant” to them isn’t fixed,...
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Listen to the ABT TIme podcast
The most recent podcast interview to cover the Better Posters book is on the ABT Time podcast, episode 39, hosted by Randy Olson.“ABT” in ABT Time is the abbreviation for “And, but, therefore” – the...
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Hung punctuation
Below is a recent cover of The Lancet.The Lancet does a pull quote (an excerpt from an article inside) on every cover. I just wanted to draw your attention to a little detail that shows this is done by...
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Eye tracking
Eye tracking is a research tool that has not, as far as I know, been applied to conference posters yet.In the past, this required some specialized, expensive equipment like custom glasses. But as with...
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The TikTok test for poster talks
Try making a TikTok video of yourself presenting your poster. It doesn’t matter if the poster isn’t done yet. This is purely a tool for you, so it’s okay.TikTok, the world’s most popular website, now...
View ArticleBetter Posters email newsletter
I hear old email newsletters are the new hot thing again. If, like nobody else, you don’t get enough emails and would like even more email, you can subscribe to Better Posters on Substack. There s no...
View ArticlePublic health in poster sessions
I have been freaking out a little over seeing people posting pictures from in person conferences and seeing very few masks.I got thinking about this, and realized that good design can not only help...
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Link round-up for June 2022
Diego Salvatierra analyzes a trend in web design, “Boxmoji” 📦😀. The two key components of the style are emojis everywhere and thick black lines. He writes:The flat colors, no outlines, and fullwidth...
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Same graph, different narratives
People who make data visualizations often talk about “storytelling with data visualizations.” This is something that I think can be hard for people to wrap their heads around. Let me try an...
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Review: The Visual Story
The Visual Story is a book about the visual language of movies. Why am I reviewing it here? Because Bruce Block goes way down into the basics of what makes up visual communication.When he write there...
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Cognitive load in a poster session
How hard do you have to think to “get” something? The technical term for that difficulty is cognitive load. It’s a useful concept for any sort of communication. Sinbinga and Waldron have a nice article...
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Link round-up for July 2022
One of the things I tried to do in the Better Posters book was to think about how a poster session feels for someone who is not a young healthy white man. I wish I had read this article on stuttering /...
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Remove one thing: Lessons from Chanel
Coco Chanel is to fashion what Albert Einstein is to science: a lot of stuff gets attributed to these people that they never said.This quote is often attributed to Chanel:“Before you leave the house,...
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Expectations and visual noise: Lessons from washing machines
“How do I turn this on?”I was visiting, trying to use the washing machine, and was confronted with this.When you want to turn on something with a knob, you look for something around the dial that...
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