publisher tips

This month’s contender for “Best conference poster” was spotted by Greg Fell : Clever! • • • • •  If you have a fabric poster, Crystal Lantz can show you how to turn that ol’ science communication into a lovely tote bag ! She’s got detailed instructions, but you’re on your own for the sewing machine. Hat tip to Crystal Lantz and Caitlin verder Weele. • • • • •  I missed these tweets from Suzy Styles about poster club back in August, when there was discussion about harassment in poster sessions: The First Rule of Poster Club is... 🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do 🤛🏻not 🤛🏻 talk🤛🏻about... 🤛🏻the presenter’s appearance 🤛🏻the presenter’s phone number 🤛🏻who you think ‘actually’ wrote the code 🤛🏻basically anything other than the poster and relevant scientific context 🤷🏻‍♀️ The Second Rule of Poster Club is... 🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do🤛🏻not 🤛🏻try to look down the presenter’s top 🤛🏻stand unnecessarily close 🤛🏻touch the presenter 🙅🏻 🤛🏻block the p...

Always fascinated by what happens to posters after the conference, particularly posters in the hands of crafty people. Beth Stuart says of her poster quilt: I’m not sure this version is any worse at communicating science than the original. Hat tip to Katy Kennedy . • • • • • As part of a larger argument about public engagement, Bex writes : Imagine if our poster sessions were held in public transport stations and you had to explain your research to commuters - and have an eye-catching poster! If anyone does this experiment, let me know! • • • • • Nice thread from Tracey Weissgerber on graph design. It’s based on this article from 2015 , so I’ve probably mentioned it before in this blog. • • • • • Speaking of complex graphs, Predromics has purrfected the box-and-whisker plot: Hat tip to Ai Lyn Tan . • • • • • I’m had to ask Alisha Oshlack what a “rapid fire poster” is. But the Genome International 2018 me...

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 Tob...

Best repurposing of a conference poster for the month goes to Wendy Yoder : (For something on this Internet, this blog has not had enough cats.) Hat tip to Colin Purr ington. A collection of awesome seminar posters at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I may have featured these on the blog before... but there have been more since then, so it’s worth revisting. Yun Tao (via Holly Bik ) observed: Our current crappy seminar posters (word doc, comic sans) trivialize the gravitas/seriousness of seminars. Hat tip to Jenny Merritt and Dr. Becca. Quote of the month from Benjamin Mazer : “So you have to make a poster for the science fair? Didn’t you do that in elementary school?” – my mother, clearly not an academic. Sparklines are mini graphs inserted into text, created by Edward Tufte. Now it’s easier than ever to create them with a special typeface . It’s called ATF Spark . Hat tip to Dr. Becca . Typography jokes : Hat tip to Janet Stemwedel. If you have anxiety about attending conf...

This month’s nominee for “Best poster ever” comes from the Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting, and was created by Julian Resasco , with pictures by Andrew Bell : I got multiple people forwarding this to me, and saw many positive comments on Twitter, so this one is definitely a fan favourite. I am hoping Julian will submit this to the blog so we can talk about it in more detail later! Hat tip to Jacquelyn Gill , Michele Banks , and Megan Lynch . The ESA meeting also gave us a candidate for “best poster reuse”: Hat tip to Nathan Emery and the Ecological Society of America. Data is the Spotlight is a blog that does for figures what this one does for posters. Hat tip to Arjun Raj and Prachee Avasthi. Terry McGlynn makes an important point about conference scheduling , using the ESA meeting as an example : Many with “late-breaking” posters are stuck on Friday because they weren’t aware of the deadline, or didn’t have funding 6 months ago. Who is most likely to not get the heads...

Diana Hernandez has this month’s “best re-use of a poster” nominee: How to deal with awkward questions at a conference , by Dani Rabaiotti. Hat tip to Stephen Heard. Netflix recently premiered an original documentary about design called Abstract: The Art of Design . I’ve been waiting to mention it until I finished it. Each of the eight episodes showcases one designer in a different field. Each is a combination of biography and case study. It’s good, but not great . For poster makers, probably the most relevant is Episode 6, featuring Paula Scher, which is mostly about typography. I also like Episodes 2 and 5, on shoe and car design. respectively, because those are the furthest from my experience and the most novel to me. Speaking of typography, Bear Knee Sanders probably had no idea what he was wading into with this tweet : Heaven . God : You may ask me one question. Me : Why aren’t there lowercase and uppercase numbers? God : What? Me : I wanna write loud numbers. Watch the type nerd...

Neil Cohn wins the “ Best poster reuse " award for this month: Neil writes: Given my last poster, I can't help but design my poster for #CogSci2017 thinking how I'm just going to turn it into pillows afterwards This short (30 second) video shows the same data, plotted different ways: D3 Show Reel from Mike Bostock on Vimeo . Think about what your intuitive reaction is to these different plots. As I have said before, design is all about choices, and sometimes we underestimate how many choices we have in showing our data. You can find more about the data here . I’m not sure what the difference between a fact box and an infographic is, but I’m intrigued by this article about the effectiveness of fact boxes. Hat tip to Hilda Bastien . Speaking of infographics, there’s a whole gallery of them here . Hat tip to Brett Favaro . I have become obsessed with titles. This slide about headlines makes the point: On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body...

Who else got a Christmas present delivered in poster-styled gift wrapping? Hat tip to Shit Academics Say . Sometimes we have a best poster of the month, but this is probably the first nominee for best poster tube (click to enlarge): Hat tip to Ashley Cambell for discovering the whiskey tube scientist. From a geology meeting. Naturally. Post of the month for December goes to Scott Cole , who analyzed the attendance at 2,579 posters at Neuroscience. It is disappointing to learn 17% of posters had nobody at them. But if you ever have more than two people at your poster, you’re in the top half! Hat tip to Adam Calhoun . Your title is the headline for your poster. This article looks at how headlines matter like never before , particularly online. (E)ven with the best-crafted headline in the world, for every person who clicks on it, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who see it, digest it, and simply move on. People get their news from headlines now in a way they never did in the pas...

Kaitlyn Werner is the winner of this month’s “Best re-use of a conference poster (beach edition)”: Alex Barnard took a poster into the third dimension with 3-D printing: This is not the first time I’ve shown a poster with a third dimension on this blog , but it’s still unusual enough to warrant a mention. Hat tip to Guanyang Zhang and Maslay Lab. Despite the tweet containing the #evol2016 hashtag, this poster was not at the Evolution 2016 meeting (I know, I saw them all), but I guess was similar to work presented at a talk there. Academic Poster on Twitter is worth a peek. The profile says, “This page is linked to the only academic poster expert blog on the internet.” I believe it’s referring to this page , since the account doesn’t link here. (This blog does appear under “ Helpful links .” Thank you – I try to be helpful whenever I can!) Lenny Teytelman reports on the European Bioinformatics Institute conference’s solution to, “Can I share this on social media?” They made cards y...