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Link roundup for January 2014
If you want your poster to look modern, try using fonts that were designed in this century. MyFonts has a list of their most popular fonts from last year. Many of them are display fonts (like the...
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Wanna do graphics? Pease’s book more about the job than the work
I continue to hunt for introductory books on graphic design to give academics who have avoided anything even closely resembling “art” classes a way into the craft of design. As I wrote before, kids’...
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Critique: Flowers and seeds
Today’s two posters are from Nicole Soper Gorden, who generously sent these forward. Here’s one of her old ones, which you can click to enlarge:Nicole calls this poster “perfectly serviceable,” which...
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The excellent, the bad, and the generic
Jillian Deines went looking for inspiration for her posters the way most of us try to solve problems now. She searched on Google. Because Google customizes search results, my hits might not look...
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Why do typefaces make you feel things? Hat tip to Brandy Weidow for this one.
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Review: Slidedocs
Nancy Duarte is one of the best in the business when it comes to design of slide decks. After three conventionally published books on paper, she has just released her fourth, Slidedocs, as a free ebook...
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Critique and makeover: Semantics
Today’s posters come from Anna Pryslopska, and are shown with her permission. Let’s see the first version of her poster (click to enlarge):Anna created this poster, and the revision below, in Inkscape,...
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Misplaced priorities on institutional templates
Commenter k brought my attention to this poster template from Iowa State University (click to enlarge).The template gets it exactly wrong. The order of elements at the top is 180° away from what it...
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Link roundup for March 2014
Hood Scientist takes a look at the making of this cool wanted poster:I’m also grateful to the link to this post on making chemistry posters. It includes this video. The advice is generally sound,...
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Text wrapping in Publisher, or, “Why are you still using PowerPoint for...
Alexis Rudd made the poster below in PowerPoint. But Alexis wanted something else to make posters. I asked if she had Publisher, often bundled with the same Microsoft Office package that contains...
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Critique: Sea otters
Jessica Hale tweeted this poster (click to enlarge) for the 2014 Northwest Student Society for Marine Mammalogy annual meeting with a request to make it, and I quote, “suck less”:I tweeted these...
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Time flew! The (belated) fifth anniversary
Whoops! I missed it!I have had my head down doing a lot of technical academic writing. I completely forgot about the fifth blogiversary of Better Posters at the start of March!It is a little hard to...
View ArticleGuest post at The Conference Mentor
The Conference Mentor is a blog devoted to conference organization. They asked me a few questions about presenting posters.I talk about why posters are a tool for democracy and talks are elitist;...
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Critiques: Newtown and white noise
This following two posters come from a contributor who has asked to have identifying information removed from these posters. The creator of these wrote:Coming from a design back ground, research...
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Link roundup for April 2014
I’ve blogged about digital posters from time to time, but I have yet to see or hear them done well. Das Terminal is apparently trying to position itself for the inevitable future of posters on screens...
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Critique: Irrigation and butterflies
Today’s contribution comes from Andrea Barden (click to enlarge):She writes:I used a green and blue orientated theme as to me it linked in with the theme of the topic (irrigation).This is a good way to...
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Hang ‘em high
Earlier this year, I wrote about a conference with one of the worst poster session layouts ever: one on top of the other, with the bottom one at crotch level.Sadly, nobody at my own institution read...
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Critique: Crab burial
Today, I’m pleased to present an award winning poster from Emma Locatelli. This one took Council Poster Prize at the Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting in 2012. You can click to enlarge:This...
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Critique and makeover: Zen microbiome (no relation)
Today’s sharing come from Jenna Lang, and is used with her permission. Click to enlarge:This poster has a different goal than most of the posters here. It’s a recruiting tool, not a research report....
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Critique: Visualising sound
In my grad program, we had a grad school departmental seminar every year, where all students would give 15 minute talks on their research. The first year students often gave some of the best talks.This...
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