publisher tips

A couple of weeks ago in the link round-up, I featured a video from Mike Morrison . Mike’s year-in-the-making video attracted plenty of attention , and is at the bottom of this post in case you missed it. Eugene Ofofsu has already used this format on a prize-winning poster . Let’s have a look at Morrison’s template. Morrison’s design has four components. An extremely large take away message in the middle. This is the biggest difference between Morrison’s design and most academic posters. A structured abstract in a sidebar on the left. Fiddly bits for superfans and aficionados in a sidebar on the right. A QR code in the bottom middle. While I don’t share his deep pessimism about poster sessions, particularly presenting (“nothing's worse than presenting a poster”), Morrison’s design is thoughtful. In particular, it takes the principle I have often espoused that “Nothing should compete with the title” and “The title is 90% of your communication effort” and runs with it . The central...

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.