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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 shown a poster with a third dimension on this blog, but it’s still unusual enough to warrant a mention. Hat tip to Guanyang Zhang and Maslay Lab. Despite the tweet containing the #evol2016 hashtag, this poster was not at the Evolution 2016 meeting (I know, I saw them all), but I guess was similar to work presented at a talk there.

Academic Poster on Twitter is worth a peek. The profile says, “This page is linked to the only academic poster expert blog on the internet.” I believe it’s referring to this page, since the account doesn’t link here. (This blog does appear under “Helpful links.” Thank you – I try to be helpful whenever I can!)

Lenny Teytelman reports on the European Bioinformatics Institute conference’s solution to, “Can I share this on social media?” They made cards you could put on your poster:



Katie Everson, writing at the Molecular Ecologist blog, has 10 tips to improve conference posters. Most of these will be familiar to readers of this blog, but it’s always nice to see how other people phrase them! Hat tip to Katie Everson.


Next up we have a deep dive into the science of human perception, which can tell us a lot about designing graphics. For instance, Lots of cool information in there, like how scale affects our sense of correlation.


And while I have been known to make a dig at pie charts from time to time, research shows that for some purposes, they work very well:

Six decades later, and in three more experiments, pie charts were hailed for their strength in conveying proportional data, in some way or another.

Pretty sure none of the principles in the article above could justify this graphic, though:


Hat tip to Tim van der Zee and Michael Hunsacker.

I’ve emphasized the importance of titles before. This research argues that 70% of people on Facebook only read headlines before commenting.

Filed under, “I’m astonished he got away with it,” have a look at this doctoral thesis (from 2008.) It’s stunning looking. Hat tip to David Schoppik and Raven.

Dynamic Ecology has updated their list of conference preparation tips. Hat tip to Chris Buddle.

A interactive poster.


Not the first to use this technology, however. Hat tip to Paul Cannon and Academic Posters.

A good title is critical to a poster. This article on crafting titles for journal articles contains some ideas that can be applied to posters, too.
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