publisher tips

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...