publisher tips

After a few days suspension , the automated Twitter feed for this blog is now back up and running! Please follow @Better_Posters if you want updates of new posts. Thanks to Twitter customer service for not taking too long in reviewing the appeal. Sigh. All because I was just trying to add a new header graphic to the Twitter account. Hat tip to Cecil Adams’s Straight Dope for the tagline.

Mia de los Reyes is today’s contributor, with a pair of posters for perusal. Since both have similar styles, I’m going to mostly talk about both in one go at the end. Click to enlarge the first one! Mia says of this poster: This was presented at a conference for a very specific subfield (“ Stellar Archaeology as a Time Machine to the First Stars ”), so I felt a bit more free to use jargon that I otherwise wouldn’t put on a poster. I was inspired by the format of Meredith Rawls’s poster , which you featured a while ago. She also notes there are some line artifacts caused by one of the images. Mia’s second poster is one of the things we love – an award winner! This won a grad student award at the American Astronomical Society’s 233rd meeting . Mia writes: This had a more general audience, hence the “take-away points” box. I know that boxes are sometimes overdone, but I personally like the way they help me organize the flow of the poster. Mia’s use of boxes works, I think, for a few ...

The automated Twitter feed for this blog (@Better_Posters) is currently down. I had logged in to make a few cosmetic changes to the feed. When I did, I was prompted to add a birthday, so I picked the day the blog went live. Little did I know that since this was ten years ago, it didn’t meet Twitter’s minimum age requirement of 13. This instantly got the account locked. I have put in a service ticket, and will post here when the feed is back.

Mike Morrison has a 20 minute video describing what a poster session is and how to make a poster. Unlike Mike, however, I do not believe poster sessions are “holding the human race back in a non insignificant way.” The video, particularly the first half, is pessimistic about poster sessions. Around 13:25, good stuff starts to happen as Mike outlines a good poster design. I think he overestimates people’s willingness to snap pictures of QR codes, though. Mike has provided templates here , and is working on a study validating the design he has. He is looking for grad students to participate. You can email him at Mike.A.Morrison@gmail.com . Amy Burgain saw this video and offers this alternative : Amy writes: It achieves the clear simple message BUT emphasizes how that message is supported by the DATA. It keeps the goal of understanding how the conclusion is related to the data while also making it easier to glean main messages. I plan to have my own longer post about this in a couple of...

Today’s contribution comes from Ram Vaidhyanath! Click to enlarge: Radiology’s whol deal is taking pictures, which makes it a very visual field. This poster takes advantage of that, and uses lots of high quality images. Those are excellent. The title is big and extremely visible from a distance. Same with the headings. The bars under the title and heading is a nice visual touch, too. It helps break up the space a little. One possible issue is that the bar under the title is about the same length as the word “Pictorial,” making it look like a botched attempt at underlining the word. The bar might be a little better if it was either lengthened or shortened so that it didn’t “attach” itself to the word above it. The layout is clear in the order of expected reading, but there are a couple of things that are a little frustrating. That the three right columns align the pictures in them precisely makes the single picture in the left hand column stand out, and not in a good way. In a rather ja...

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 b...