publisher tips

Today’s poster is about the Capricorn Experiment, not to be confused with the 1970s conspiracy movie, Capricorn One : The only conspiracy in the new poster, from Vidhi Bharti at Monash University in Melbourne, is the justification for “Capricorn”. It’s supposed to be an abbreviation for, “Clouds, Aerosols, Precipitation, Radiation, and Atmospheric Composition Over the Southern Ocean.” The experiment should really be “Capracoso.” I mean, you just don’t get to make abbreviations out of any letter somewhere in the word! It would be like abbreviating the Univ e rsity of Te x as Ri o Gra n de Vall e y as “EXONE”. But I digress. Let’s look at the poster, which you can click to enlarge! Vidhi wrote: I work on boundary layer meteorology, which basically deals with a lot of mathematical equations and unattractive diagrams. Therefore, presenting it all in an attractive package is a big challenge. Vidhi does a good job of rising to that challenge with this poster. I like the way this poster tack...

Last week , I showed a sweet poster from Desi Quintans . Desi added a great question in his email that I thought deserved its own blog post: I noticed that the posters that did well in real life were made with strong, almost gaudy colours. In particular, the ones with very large blocks of strong colour were quickly noticed compared to the understated ones like mine. How can one walk the line between elegant design and the reality of grabbing a person's attention in a room that's already visually and aurally noisy? Let’s look as Desi’s poster again, just for context. Click to enlarge! Desi calls this poster “understated,” which is an apt description. As I wrote last week , I like this power a lot, but I think Desi’s description is apt. You might also call it subtle. What are the characteristics that give it that look? (Click to enlarge.) A lot has to do with the colour scheme. There are a lot of earthy tones, particularly up in the title. Even when using primary colours in ...

Most of the time, I think my poster aesthetic might be described as Swiss style. That’s the period that saw the creation of Helvetica, for instance. It’s a style that is very spare and very organized , with lots of emphasis on grids. You can see it in this poster I made for the American Society for Parasitologists meeting in 2014. Click to enlarge! This was a noble, but in my mind, failed experiment. I wanted someone to get the main point of the poster by reading across the top row. I wanted people to get the supporting details in each column. It kind of works, kind of doesn’t. The top row works best because it is all photos. The graphics in the rows below that are not consistent enough to make the idea work. The text block in the bottom right doesn’t follow through with the lines established in the two rows above, and the three images to the left of it. I still like using huge numbers to bring home the main difference in infection rates between the two species instead of a graph. Si...

Microsoft Publisher is my go to software package for making posters. It hits a sweet point for me between power and ease of use. I recently found another reason to use Publisher: it lets you in to a whole new realm of type you might not have known existed. Many professional fonts in the OpenType format include not only standard letters, but alternate letter shapes, or “glyphs.” For instance, you can have you choice of shapes for lowercase “g”: Or fantastic artistic swashes: I recently bought a new font for a poster, Plusquam Sans , in part because I wanted to play with the alternate glyphs. I almost had a heart attack because I couldn’t find the alternate glyphs at first. But I got lucky, and stumbled up how to use them. Of the entire Microsoft Office package, it seems that only Publisher lets you play with alternate glyphs and swashes without too much effort. Here’s how. Select your text, then go up to the ribbon an pop up the fonts menu. Once you have the font menu, look for the “Typ...

My last link roundup came out just before this year’s Academy Awards, which featured an ill-fated announcement of announcing the wrong winner. This article argues that the card design could have been much better and possibly avoided that memorable but embarassing moment. That’s horrible typography. I will emphasize that again: horrible. Or, to be nicer, not good. Look at it again. Of course anyone could’ve made the same honest error! The words “Best Actress” are on there  —  at the very bottom  —  in small print. You are on television with millions of people around the world watching. You are a little nervous, and you have to read a card. You will most likely read it from top to bottom without questioning whether the card is right. ... Here’s what should’ve been changed based on the three critiques I just made: The logo doesn’t need to be at the top of this card. Everyone knows it’s the Oscars. We move the Oscars logo to the bottom where it’s least important in this context. The ...

The “Best of Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology” continues, with this contribution courtesy of Matthew Murphy! Click to enlarge! This is a very successful poster on multiple counts. There is not a lot of text. The visuals are simple, with a strong but limited colour palette. The reading order is clear. Matthew wrote: Almost all of the elements of the poster were created using open-source graphic design software. Some preliminary work (especially editing the reference image of the frog icon) was done in GIMP. The vector images were developed in InkScape, and the whole thing was assembled in InkScape. I used an individual layer for each section. The fonts used are Steve Matteson’s Open Sans and Open Sans Extrabold, both freely available through Google Fonts. With open source materials, I have argued that you sometimes get what you pay for . When I saw this poster, I wondered if Open Sans had the chops necessary for the job, because I was struck by the dumb quotes (also calle...