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.

Mike Morrison has a 20 minute video describing what a poster session is and how to make a poster. Unlike Mike, however, I do not believe poster sessions are “holding the human race back in a non insignificant way.” The video, particularly the first half, is pessimistic about poster sessions. Around 13:25, good stuff starts to happen as Mike outlines a good poster design. I think he overestimates people’s willingness to snap pictures of QR codes, though. Mike has provided templates here , and is working on a study validating the design he has. He is looking for grad students to participate. You can email him at Mike.A.Morrison@gmail.com . Amy Burgain saw this video and offers this alternative : Amy writes: It achieves the clear simple message BUT emphasizes how that message is supported by the DATA. It keeps the goal of understanding how the conclusion is related to the data while also making it easier to glean main messages. I plan to have my own longer post about this in a couple of...

Today’s contribution comes from Ram Vaidhyanath! Click to enlarge: Radiology’s whol deal is taking pictures, which makes it a very visual field. This poster takes advantage of that, and uses lots of high quality images. Those are excellent. The title is big and extremely visible from a distance. Same with the headings. The bars under the title and heading is a nice visual touch, too. It helps break up the space a little. One possible issue is that the bar under the title is about the same length as the word “Pictorial,” making it look like a botched attempt at underlining the word. The bar might be a little better if it was either lengthened or shortened so that it didn’t “attach” itself to the word above it. The layout is clear in the order of expected reading, but there are a couple of things that are a little frustrating. That the three right columns align the pictures in them precisely makes the single picture in the left hand column stand out, and not in a good way. In a rather ja...

This week’s poster comes from Jeremy Hemberger . I believe that this was presented at last year’s Entomological Society of America meeting. Click to enlarge! Jeremy writes that the graphic design parts were done in Illustrator. All the pieces were then assembled using inDesign. I love the relaxed feel of this poster. One of the things that helps tremendously is that it very consciously and deliberately shows how it is not trying to fill all the available space. The bottom quarter or so of the poster contains a couple of logos (appropriately tucked down in the corner) and some simple, inviting artwork. And even between the two of those, there is a big space in light blue that is comfortable just holding space and doing nothing else. It’s kind of a glorious signal of confidence. More stuff would look desperate. I like how the title is broken down in a a simple, highlighted phrase on the left, and a smaller subtitle over on the right. I haven’t seen author information handled this way b...

Today’s poster comes from contributor Benjamin Wu. Click to enlarge! Ben and I talked about capitalization, particularly in the title. There are three styles: headline / title casing (on left below), sentence casing (right), and all capitals. (The example above is not a good example for a poster, because the title is the same size as the main text. You wouldn’t have on a poster title.) I see examples of all three on posters all the time. I’m not a fan of all capitals, because it looks shouty, like a Hulk or Dalek Twitter account. I lean towards sentence casing, because we read sentences all the time. It makes it easier to recognize proper nouns . But proper nouns (name of person, place, or thing) should always be capitalized in any case! The poster’s layout is clean, with consistent space between boxes both horizontally and vertically.  The left quarter of the poster is mostly taken up with an abstract, and it is killing me. Having any abstract is bad enough, but this one is ...

It has been a decade since I started this blog. It had a slow start, but it has turned into one of the most successful, and rewarding, projects of my career. Thank you. To readers who have shown me that this is helpful, thank you. To those who have recommended the blog to others, thank you. To contributors who have been generous enough to share your posters with me and blog readers, a big thank you.You have made it much easier for this blog to continue by always giving me new things to talk about. I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention that a book about poster design is coming. A book written by me, published by Pelagic Publishing . Before I committed to writing a poster book, I needed to be sure it would provide value above and beyond what the blog already does. I’ve always felt there needs to be a reason for writing a book for academics. I see a lot of books (particularly textbooks) that don’t provide much different than others in the field. I never wanted to write a bo...

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...

Very helpful article about how to pick two typefaces that complement each other, Almost every text-based layout will benefit from more than one typeface. ... With the right pairing, your typography will instantly appear more professional, polished, and attractive. • • • • • Kaoru Sakabe discusses best practices in figure assembly. Hat tip to ASBMB. • • • • • Brent Thorne has help for R users: Do you like #RMarkdown but also need to make a conference poster? Well, the posterdown 📦 has been updated to include: fully customised colour options, sizing of your #PDF conference poster, and automated citation generation🙃🎉 Check it out here . • • • • • A listicle on the eight most popular types of posters says this about conference style posters: What makes educational or research posters different is that most posters are very visually pleasing to the eye and rely on composition and aesthetic qualities while educational ones often rely on information and presenting a resumed version of t...

I’ve visited the issue of poster accessibility on this blog, but mainly in the context of visual issues, like colour blindness and dyslexia. Of course, these are not the only challenges the people might face attending a scientific conference. Amy-Charlotte Devitz, a.k.a. The Bendy Biologist on Twitter, has a great blog post talking about navigating a scientific conference in a wheelchair with a service dog. The conference at hand is the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting this month in Tampa, Florida. Here’s an excerpt, focusing in on what she says about poster sessions (emphasis added). 100+ posters were on display and you had a chance to interact with those who had made them. These were admittedly a bit of a challenge to navigate in a chair. It was crowded, meaning it was very hard to move around, and with so many people around I wasn’t able to get a proper look at many of the posters. The alternative was to come and look at the posters before the offic...

Today’s poster contributor is Scott Johnson. Click to enlarge! This is a great marriage of content and form. The content is about something that is unabashedly “low tech,” so the hand-written, slightly lo-fi (okay, low tech) look is completely right here. It adds character and interest. Regular readers know that I personally am anti-underlining, and try to remove it in almost every instance I see it. But here, because it’s hand written, I can see the case for it. When people write by hand, they do underline for emphasis. I would experiment a bit with removing the underline, but I don’t know if removing the the underlines for headings and making the headinga a bit bolder would lose the look. I appreciate the purity of the monochrome greyscale, but it does wash out from a distance. I would like to see a little colour – even if subdued, and not everywhere. To keep the “low tech” look, I would suggest referencing some old photos, like daguerreotypes. They often weren’t pure shades of gr...

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...

For the first blog post of the year, allow me to ruin a poster. And even more ironically, I’m about to ruin an award-winning poster. This week’s contribution came from Sally Min. It was presented at McMaster Innovation Showcase, where it won the People’s Choice poster award. Click to enlarge! When I first opened the file, I thought, “This is strong.” We have that intense White Stripes colour scheme . The diagonals add a lot of visual interest and make the poster look different than the usual rectangular format. There is not a lot to read, because the poster uses icons and flow charts effectively. But those diagonals, which bring so much of the cool look to the poster, also mess with the poster. They look like arrow heads. We expect to follow arrows. At a glance, this is how I expect the order of stuff on the poster to flow. But the numbers make is clear that this is the order the authors intended. We don’t expect to go “left and up” from section 5 to 6, because there is stuff to the ...

It’s a small link round-up for this holiday season, but I have one I want to share, particularly given that last week’s post was musing about how we train students in graphic design. This article talks about teaching data visualization to kids. Fourth grade students, in fact. That’s what makes it a perfect holiday post, because kids love holidays. Or something. We might be taught how to read line, bar, and pie charts in elementary school because they have been around longer than others and are used the most. ... I’m not foolish enough to think I could teach 30 kids an array of new graphs in one afternoon, but I could at least help them understand that there’s more to the world than line, bar, and pie charts. The post also talks about a Match-It game for data visualization that looks interesting. And for a lighter touch, here’s a graphic artist’s breakdown of all the Marvel movie posters . That wraps up the year for the blog. Next year will be big for this blog. I have some very ...

This blog exists to help solve a problem: that academic conference posters are ugly. But I am under no illusions that this blog is going to fix the problem. So, what would move the dial the quality of conference posters? When faced with this kind of question, I often see people say, “We should include this in our training for students!” As an educator, I never want to be the person to say we shouldn’t train students. I’ve done it myself, often. I support this sentiment, but I’m wary of calls for “more training,” for two reasons. First, suggestions for “more training” make me worry about mission creep. Over time, I’ve heard that students need more training in statistics. And in writing. And in ethics. And in grantsmanship. And in social media. And diversity issues. And in dealing with media. And in public outreach. And so on. Don’t get me wrong, these are all worthy topics where I think training would be beneficial. But there is only so much we can realistically expect to make st...

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers features a fantastic battle scene: the battle for Helm’s Deep. There’s a lot of reasons why it works. The scale and physicality of it is awesome. But there is one factor that is underrated. In the DVD commentary, director Peter Jackson talked about watching famous sieges and battles of film, like Zulu . He said that what he learned from those was that the secret was all in the build-up . The movie spends a lot of time making sure that the audience understands the situation. The fortress is literally set against a mountain, creating the impression of “backs against the wall.” The city is outnumbered, with hundreds of defenders against thousands of attackers.  And you see that army of thousands marching in. Not doing anything at first. Just standing there. Then thumping their spears and yelling. More waiting. And then the army charges and all hell breaks loose and it is on . And when those orc charge and start throwing ladders up against the for...

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...