Skip to main content

Link roundup for October 2017

This month’s link round-up begins with a big tutorial on making posters by Desi Quintans, “How I make conference posters.”

Excerpt:

About my design ethos

I think that visual design is just as important as content. I believe that by adapting lessons from other fields of publishing, we can design posters that are unconventional and surprising, and yet attractive to look at and informative to read. The alternative is to be cursed with posters that all look the same.

This lengthy piece covers some material that’s familiar to regular readers, but provides it in a convenient one-stop shop. It’s this month’s “must read!”

•••••


Nichloas Rowe has authored Academic & Scientific Poster Presentation: A Modern Comprehensive Guide for Springer. I may have a longer review later, but wanted to bring this to people’s attention now.

•••••

Earyn McGee also has a thread on Twitter that describes her lessons as an early poster presenter, presenting at the SACNAS 2017 conference. Hat tip to Toby.

•••••

Dan Quintana also provides helpful advice, but it’s more concise.

Can it be read by three people standing three meters away after three beers?

That’s the whole thing.

•••••

An academic poster in a cartoon style.


Hat tip to Rainer Melzer.

•••••

Kayla Brandi makes a cape of her poster.


Hat tip to Juan Ruiz and Auriel Fournier.

•••••

Amber Dance has a nice feature in Nature on what makes for a good conference. The take aways are that you need to create “hallway conversation,” have a diverse group of people, and pick a good location.

•••••

Up for discussion in the PeerJ preprint server by Foster and colleagues is a discussion paper on “Good Practice for Conference Abstracts and Presentations.” Here’s what they say about posters:

3.2 Posters

3.2.1 While it is technically possible to make posters permanently available (e.g. on conference websites or platforms such as F1000 Research), some journals regard this as prior publication so it may prevent full publication. Authors should therefore check the policies of their target journal(s) before agreeing to a poster being publicly posted.

3.2.2 Posters are not peer-reviewed by conferences and may not describe all aspects of the research . Posters should therefore not be viewed as a substitute for a full article in a peer-reviewed journal. However, if a poster is publicly available (and, ideally, searchable via an indexing system or DOI ) it may be cited until the full publication is available (although some journals consider citation of posters as unpublished information rather than full citations).

3.2.3 The lead author (e.g. principal investigator) should be given the first option to attend the poster session(s) but this role may be taken by other authors or a local presenter (if the authors do not speak the language of the conference). The poster presenter should be agreed before the abstract is submitted.

Hat tip to Jackie Marhington and PeerJ.

•••••

Mice, as depicted in scientific journals:


This collection, curated by Neuroskeptic, is a good opportunity to think about the choices behind each figure. No two are the same. Which ones work, and which ones don’t?

•••••

Jared Spool said:

“Great designers do not fall in love with their solution. Great designers fall in love with the problem.”

Hat tip to Julie Dirksen.

•••••

Men ask more questions than women in conference sessions. I wonder if this holds true in poster sessions, too? Hat tip to Amy Hinsley and Joshua Drew.

•••••

When competing for attention, playing against expectations can be powerful:


Hat tip to Jason and Asia Murphy.

•••••

Kimm Hannula has a little Twitter thread about how conferences can create “social capital.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Scott McCloud’s “Big triangle” and poster design

Posters are a visual medium. But not everything is equally visual. A picture of a real object is very visual, and the best thing to have on a poster. A scatter plot is less visual. And text is the least of all. I was thinking about how I might make that point, um, visually, and I suddenly realized that I was just recreating one side of Scott McCloud ’s triangle from Understanding Comics . If you have not read Understanding Comics ... oh, how I envy you. You have that to look forward to. It is a wonderful book. Even if you are the sort who thinks, “Ugh, superheroes,” get over it, read this damn book, and have your consciousness expanded. It is an undisputed classic book. Here’s a except relevant to the matter at hand: And that’s the point I was trying to make, except McCloud did it better over twenty years ago. Received information is immediate; perceived information takes effort. This is why nobody likes posters with too much writing. It takes effort that, in a busy conference settin...

Reading gravity

Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ. I recently learned that something I’ve called “ the Cosmo principle ” on this blog is an actual thing that proper designers talk about, except they have a different name for it. They call it “reading gravity.” The picture above is sometimes called a “Gutenberg diagram.” Apparently it was given that name by newspaper designer Edmond Arnold (interviewed here , where he refers to the “Gutenberg principle”). I’m not completely sure about this; need to do some more reading. What this image calls the “primary optical area,” I’ve usually called the “sex story,” because that’s invariably what occupies that position on every cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. The “terminal area” is usually what I’ve called the “take home message.” What I find usually ends up in the lower left corner, or “weak fallow area” as its called here, are my methods section. And that’s fine, because those are usually only of interest to the afficiandos. This diagram is wort...

Critique and makeover: Buffer it out

Today's poster is a contribution from William Elaban. This was not for a conference, but a class. Click to enlarge! Now, I have to apologize to William here, because my first reaction to this poster is not a kind one. But sometimes, my first reaction to a poster is: “Blow it up. Blow it all up. Blow it all up and start again.” This poster has deep structural issues. There is too much text. The reading order is all over the place. When the problems are that big, you want to see a fresh page. But first impressions can lie. Then I calm down and start tinkering. And by following some of the usual design principles, the poster slowly but steadily gets better. The first thing I did was get rid of lines. Underlined text and boxes were immediately banished. Headline case was replaced with sentence case. Next, I tackled the table. I gave it a more standard format, with just horizontal lines separating the top, header, and bottom. I cut the large number of decimal places down to a more reas...