Link roundup for August 2016

Design is about making decisions. Here’s a good look at how different decisions about the same numbers can give you dramatically different maps:

Hat tip to Justin Kiggins.

One of the problems with a long-running blog like this is that I can’t remember if I’ve linked out to this series of blog posts on data visualization before or not. I am quite certain that I have not mentioned they are all collected in an affordable ebook. And there is also this list of what students find hard about making visuals.

Someone on Quora asked what makes for an engaging scientific poster. Warning: contains me.

There was a dreadful op ed in The Guardian about being a serious academic and how social media gets in the way of that or something. Anyone who claims to be “serious” today is setting themselves up for being lampooned for self-importance. See the #SeriousAcademic hashtag on Twitter for reactions, and Emily Willingham’s riposte. Janice Geary’s reaction, though, gave me pause:

How is it that social media is controversial for the #seriousacademic, but somehow we all still make posters like they accomplish something?

Obviously, I have a horse in this race. I will argue to Janice that posters can accomplish things. My best example is how being in a poster session led to co-organizing an international symposium. I would welcome other examples! How did you get things done in a poster session?

Now, a bit of summertime fun.

If you were one of the many who dug Stranger Things on Netflix, you will be pleased to know you can tap into the power its pastiche here.

There are some limitations. It seems to stall out at five letter words for that second line. “Posters” was apparently too long for a second line. Still fun. Hat tip to Doc Becca.

Today’s demonstration of the power of proximity in design comes courtesy of this unfortunate pairing of advertisements:

Hat tip to Andrew Bloch.

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Critique: Neutrino topology

Physics is not the best represented academic field on this blog, so I was pleased to get this submission from Paola Ferrario, who was kind enough to share this with readers of the blog. Click to enlarge! I like many things about this poster. The typography is clean. The big central circle attracts the eye and breaks up the monotony of rectangles. There aren’t a huge number of words. The margins between all the elements are comfortable. There are pictures of real objects. Logos are mostly kept down in the inf print section. There is a good use of bright colours to highlight headings. I have one major problem. I know where to start reading the poster. I know where I should end up when I finish reading the poster. What I am supposed to do between those two points is completely baffling to me. The text in that big central circle is particularly baffling. That it is set against a different shape and colour provides a visual cue that suggests it isn’t part of the main text. It looks like a ...

Showing authorship on posters

More and more academic projects are collaborative . This means more contributors, and more authors to list on posters. I’ve been thinking about how long author lists might be best displayed on posters, and have a few attempts here. You can click to enlarge any picture! This might be the simplest multi-author scenario, where there are many authors, all from one institution. Many big collaborative projects involve people from different institutions, however. How can you show the affiliations of those authors? Many people emulate journals and use superscripts. This gets very complicated to read and difficult to read very quickly, however. Another approach might be to group the contributors by their institution. Let “relative contribution” or “alphabetical order” or “whatever other reason you have for deciding the order of authors” be damned. Everyone from a particular university goes together. This chews up more space, so you might be forced to use initials for the authors and cut back on...

When posters fail

When a poster fails, it’s usually because it failed early in the design process. Years ago , I showed this poster: It does not matter whether this poster does a lot of the detail work right. It does not matter how good the layout is, or how good the typography is, or whether the colour scheme is consistent and pleasing to the eye, or whether there is enough white space. None of that matters. The authors of this poster doomed it at the very beginning, when they picked a page size... and got it wrong. In my experience, there are two places where posters fail early on. On the content side, people do not edit enough . They want to include everything, rather than focusing on one thing, and the poster suffers. On the design side, people do not make a grid . They start drawing boxes without any underlying thought to structure, and treat their data like some sort of jigsaw puzzle to fit together. I was reminded of the while I was making a poster for the Student and Post-Doctoral Affairs Com...

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