publisher tips

More academic societies are hosting events on social media. One established example is the Royal Society of Chemistry Twitter Poster Conference 2019 (#RSCPoster), which is heading into its fifth year! If you want to participate, here are my top tips. Design within size limits. Twitter will only post images 5 megabytes (MB) or smaller. As a designer, I usually want to know the height and width of my image in pixels, not the size. There isn’t a simple relationship between image size in pixels and file size . Greyscale images can take up less space than colour. Different file formats use different numbers of bytes. It’s worth briefly comparing the three image formats Twitter accepts. GIF : Small file size because of its low colour resolution (8 bit colour). The only one of the three that supports animation. If you use a limited colour palette, GIF is a good option for making a large image with a small file size. JPG : Small file size because of image compression. The amount of compressi...

Sometimes, we academics believe that we have to do everything ourselves . We have to write, teach, research, analyze, manage, lead, critique, and design. Consequently, people are far too likely to take “do it yourself” (DIY) approach to poster design. This leads to people searching the web and grabbing crummy, low resolution images instead of figuring out better alternatives. We forget that our campuses have professionals who can help us with some tasks. It’s easy to forget because often those staffers have more contact with administration than faculty and students. For example, lots of campuses have offices and staff that can help with: Oversized printing . As the cost of plotter printers has come down, more campuses have one somewhere on that can be used for printing posters instead of sending them to professional printers and having to ship them back to campus. Graphics . Who do you think makes all those campus fliers and promotional material? These offices are sometimes in univers...