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Kamis, 24 September 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for September 2015 - Si Bejo Science

FoxTrot starts off this month�s link roundup...

Hat tip to J.D. Wikert.

�What�s that font?� Trying to identify a font is one of those tasks that, until recently, was something that in many cases could only be done by someone with a near encyclopedic knowledge in type design. Indentifont is a good tool for the rest of us. It walks you through a series of questions, and makes suggestions all the way.

Using Identifont, I was able to nail down the typeface on this book cover as a slightly compressed ITC Fenice...

And my new institution�s new logo as PMN Caecilia with a customized rockin� R. Bold, specifically.

Pro tip! Check the suggestions after every question. I found that sometimes, Identifont would make a correct suggestion that would go away after I answered more questions. I don�t know why, but there it is.

Be it resolved that:

It is unethical to present the same scientific poster at more than one meeting.

Drugmonkey started the debate; read the replies to the tweet for people�s responses.

There is an entire blog of free academic images. A promising resource, although it is a bit difficult to browse and search. For example, although this blog is all about images, it is entirely written in plain text.

Here are five reasons to go to conferences. Hat tip to Paige Jarreau.

How Scientific American makes its infographics. Quote from one of the illustrators:

The designer must realize that things are always more complicated than they seem. Particularly in any biological science. Moreover, any kind of catchy headlines like �we share 99 percent of DNA�, while not entirely wrong, are ultimately useless because they tell people nothing. Journalists must dig for surprising, engaging stories that reveal and manage complexity to the reader.

Hat tip to StoryBench and John Rennie.

Kamis, 27 Agustus 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for August 2015 - Si Bejo Science

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And this month�s winner for best repurposing of a conference poster goes to Will Mandy:

BioMed Central is starting a series on scientific illustrations called, What�s Wrong With This Picture?

The collection has three articles so far, each of which examines a different specific graph and how it could be improved. The one above takes on bar charts versus box plots and rescaling the Y axis.

This title for the upcoming Society for Neuroscience meeting is sure to ignite debate about whether posters should have funny titles:

12 things you didn�t know about high responder/low responder rats, stress coping, and the dorsal raphe. Number 5 will blow your mind!

Hat tip to My Cousin Amygdala.

Icons can be useful things for all sorts of graphics. There is a big icon library call the Noun Project that might be useful for in poster design. Its splash page boasts that it has 150,000 icons. I gave it a whirl by searching for �crayfish,� because those have been on my mind:

Not bad. You have a choice of downloading PNG or vector based SVG images, and it�s all available under a Creative Commons license. I will forgive them that two of their icons are definitely crabs and not crayfish. Hat tip to Paige Jarreau.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield has an album of songs from space. Fellow musician Jud Haynes (of Wintersleep) talks about the process of designing this cover.

Jud is an academic at heart:

I set out on the first phase of every good design project, �research�.

Hat tip to none other than the man himself, Chris Hadfield.

I�m a bit late to this article from two scientific illustrators talking about their craft. These guys are not doing literal interpretations of data, but they still want to get it right. Jon Hendrix says:

In my visual language, science is one of the easiest things to illustrate. There are so many nouns involved. The great thing with science, even in something as abstract as arithmetic, is there�s always some sort of image involved in it, and lots of stuff�whether it�s robots or plant material�that�s exciting to draw. It�s funny, sometimes when I do a science piece, I don�t have to draw things accurately, but I do want to value the science and the research.

Journal covers can have some similarities with posters: a big focus on key images and findings. Cell Press discusses how they pick their cover images: for the journal Neuron:

In particular:

(T)he editors have varying opinions within the team about what they prefer in a cover. Some like somewhat abstract images that require the viewer to stop and think about the connection between the visual and the experiment or idea it represents, and others prefer a beautiful scientific image over a metaphorical work of art. ... Images that look like simple reproductions of figures will most likely not be selected. In other words, no scale bars.

Rebranding a university is always tricky. I�m going through this process now. Penn State is doing this and has a new logo:. Compare the left (old) and right (new):

It hasn�t gone down well. I like the new Penn State logo in its overall design. The only problem is the eyes of the lion looks zombie-like, or, as one person said, �hypnotized.� But there isn�t much you can do about that when that is what the statue looks like:

I�d be a little creeped out having that on my campus.

Speaking of logos and rebranding, here�s an article about the creation of the distinctive NASA logo from the 70s.

Which conferences should you go to? You know, the location on the map doesn�t necessarily tell you about what the conference experience will be like. Jacquelyn Gill has some reflections on this based on her experiences with the Ecological Society of America conference:

I can attest that meeting location usually has little to do with the quality of amenities. Milwaukee, which had the lowest attendance in the last decade, is on a beautiful waterfront with lovely art deco architecture and great breweries. ... Portland and Albuquerque... were far from amenities and it was challenging to get to and from hotels and local restaurants. I hope more folks will realize this, and check out the places that aren�t as glamorous.

I wrote a guest post on the Edge for Scholars blog, describing the top three things you�re doing wrong on conference posters. Yes, I wrote and listicle, and yes, I feel dirty.

I�m also quoted in this article about the future of research conferences. The overarching theme seems to be that people want more interaction at conferences.

Kamis, 30 Juli 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for July 2015 - Si Bejo Science

link roundup QR codes type crimes

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This month�s must read is from Bethany Brookshire, a.k.a. the mighty Scicurious, who has been baking cookies for science. She is at the point where she is making posters showing the results of her experiment.

Her article is aimed at people who are still in school, but is worth reading even if you haven�t used glue sticks in a while. For instance, Bethany writes:

What makes a good poster stand out is one having what I call the three C�s.

Continuity: The poster should present a continuous story of your experiment. ...
Clarity: When you share your research with others, you want to make sure that what you did is clear. ...
Consistency: The style of a poster should be consistent to help the poster look clear.

Today�s lesson in why the spacebar was invented: to prevent the University of Florida art education department from embarrassing itself (hat tip to Jeff):

Default QR codes are kind of ugly. But here�s a way to make them more interesting. You can upload a small, high contrast image, and incorporate that into the code at this website. Fer instance, I took this UTRGV institutional logo:

And turned it into this QR code that links to the university home page.

If you squint a bit, you can kind of make out the shape of Texas! I could probably do better if I made a black and white image. Hat tip to Dustin Mayfield Jones.

While everyone is abuzz with the gorgeous images of the Pluto flyby, take a look at how the first television image of Mars was made fifty years ago this week. It�s a story of impatience and a lot of crayons. (Okay, pastels.) It�s a fascinating story of turning data into an image. Hat tip to many, including Sarcastic Rover.

�How big should the text be?� is a persistent, but not readily answered, question of poster designers. But there is a particular kind of poster where text size and visibility has to be rigorously assessed: eye charts. This article is an in-depth look at how eye charts were designed and have changed over time. Hat tip to Mocost.

Here�s one for conference organizers: how to make your meeting accessible to people who are ill or have long term disabilities. Another contribution: make sure chairs are available somewhere for the poster session for people who have trouble standing for long periods.

Album covers become iconic images. Album covers were some of the first things I thought about in design terms. One of my favourite cover designers was Malcolm Garrett, whose name appeared on records by many early 80s UK bands. Songwriter and business woman Little Boots talks about the creation of her latest album cover:

The more you learn about design, the more good descriptions of process become invaluable.

Follow this Twitter thread for some interesting comments on what people look for in a poster.

And I�m going to leave Andrew Farke with the last word this month:

All together now: Posters are often a better presentation medium than talks! For both presenter and viewer! Seriously! #2015SVP

Kamis, 25 Juni 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for June 2015 - Si Bejo Science

link roundup

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The self-declared contender for the best poster. Not just academic poster, no.

Yes, that tap at the bottom? It works.

Coverage of this poster can be found here, here, and here. Probably other places, too. Hat tip to Jeffrey Bemis.

Back to science now, with a blog post about posters for Twitter.

This week on Twitter, I came across an image that was a hybrid between a science poster and an infographic. ... The simplicity of a tweetable poster makes it easy to highlight a project�s impact or identify solutions, and by sharing them on Twitter, the reach of these posters goes far beyond that of the traditional posters you find at conferences.

A reminder from Max Roser about why you should not use pie charts:

You will know the name from your font dropdown menus on your computer, all the way at the end: Zapf. An obituary of type designer Hermann Zapf is unexpectedly rich. Hat tip to Zach Seward and Amanda Krauss.

A poster! Hat tip to figshare.

A great look at science photographer Felise Frankel.

Frankel�s goal is to capture scientifically honest photographs that, in her words, �frankly, makes you want to look at it.� Since her first image ran on the cover of Science in 1992, her images have landed on some 30 journal covers.

While posters are generally static, there�s a lot to think about in this interview about turning nanoscale bioloical processes into movies:

In promoting the biomedical animations I should avoid overstating how accurately I have depicted the reality of the molecular world. It is vastly messier, random and crowded, and it�s physical nature is unimaginably alien to our normal perception of the world around us.

The Sociobiology blog has a post describing how to organize a fab small meeting. This particular meeting emphasized talks over posters, but I include it here anyway, since I am always hopeful conference organizers are lurking here.

Kamis, 28 Mei 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for May 2015 - Si Bejo Science

link roundup

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I love this deep meditation on pixel-based art from video games. Even though it�s slightly off-topic for the blog, this is my �must read� of the month. It�s revelatory to read someone who know details of animation and art show the pros and cons of using pixels. The comparison of two takes on the Street Fighter character Chun-Li is wonderful:

When they see SFIII or KOFXIII, they don�t see the unbelievable craft that went into it, or if they do, they have to first reconcile what they see first, which is the magnified image above. They have to pay the pixel tax.

Here�s the rub, and a lesson that applies to conference posters:

Nobody owes us their time or attention. As such, when someone gives us their time, an implicit agreement is made and we are now in debt to that person. We owe it to them to deliver value for their time, and to deliver it efficiently. ... Speak in a language people can understand so that they can actually see what makes your work great without a tax.

Hat tip to Jeff Alexander.

A fairly good one sheet from Elsevier. Hat tip to Mike Taylor:

StressMarq Biosciences has a twelve point guide to making a poster. I agree with about 10 of those points. Their template is too busy, bullet points are rarely better than short paragraphs, and I don�t know why they recommend the PNG format for pictures. It�s still a pixel-based image; vector images are always better.

What can scientists learn from designers? Quite a bit:

Scientists need to remember that they are deliberately designing a product for an end-user. This focus on an audience may seem obvious, but it is surprising how many scientists forget about their target audience. We say �it is time to submit the paper to the journal,� or �we need to make a poster for the conference,� and we often forget that we are really creating products for people.

Jonathan Owen wants to help you decide when to use quotation marks. Hat tip to Mike Taylor.

�Once you understand the design of flags... you can understand the design of almost anything.� This nice TED talk makes a reasonably convincing case for that thesis, and there are lots of lessons for poster design, too. Hat tip to B. Haas. This gives me an excuse to show this flag, because it�s well designed, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and is my nation�s flag:

Compare to the flag of Milwaukee:

Far too many posters look like the Milwaukee flag.

Laura Bergalls talks about what a walk in the wood taught her about getting attention.

You may have heard that making something hard to read makes it more likely you will understand it. One fancy way of saying this is �cognitive disfluency.� Turns out... not to be the case. Hat tip to Emily Willingham , Janet Stemwedel, and Aatish Bhatia.

Mad Max: Fury Road and Captain America serve as reminders: some things are visual media. John Wick explains (original emphasis):

Watching (Mad Max: Fury Road) made me think of that meme going around with Captain America lecturing Spider-Man. It�s nearly three pages long and it�s just Cap quoting from a book. Quoting from a book.

Not only did this bore me to tears, but it also stunk like a burned out writer looking to fill page count. Now look, I�m a huge Alan Moore fan, so I�m used to verbosity in comics, but Moore understands that comics is a visual medium. This kind of exposition doesn�t belong in a visual art like comics or films. Moore gets that. So does George Miller. Everything in this movie communicates in such a powerful way that dialogue is almost unnecessary. Cap is a man of action, not a man of lecture.

Conference posters are also a visual medium.

I often use other people�s images in my posters. A new source of of high resolution public domain images can be found at the State Library Victoria. Many of these are old vintage black and white photos, which can give them a lot of visual interest. This pic of Wendy the Wombat is proof. This post is better because it has a picture of a wombat. Hat tip to my mate Ely Wallis.

Designing a new typeface is a challenge, and Japanese particularly so. Here�s a peek into a Japanese type foundry, where they are still designing each character by hand. (Original article, with images but paywalled text, is here.) Hat tip to Garr Reynolds and John Meada. http://t.co/QIiNl2N4Cm

Devony Looser on the joys of academic conferences. It includes tips:

Do not write or revise your paper or poster at the conference. I�ve seen junior and senior colleagues make this tactical error all the time. You must have your paper finished before you come to the conference... You do not earn any points with anyone by saying, �I can�t go because I have to go to my room and finish my paper.�

On the flip side, we have Christy Wampole, who is tired of conferences.

Academic conferences are a habit from the past, embraced by the administrativersity as a way to showcase knowledge and to increase productivity in the form of published conference proceedings. We have been complicit.

But... counterpoint! David Perry replies to Wampole and argues we should save conferences:

Everything I have ever published has direct origins in one or more conferences, a lineage I can trace through my CV, mapping the formal and informal ways that academic gatherings have shaped my work. And I know I�m not alone.

The book How Posters Work by Ellen Lupton is coming out soon (and you better believe I�ll be reviewing it!). Here�s an article about the exhibition the accompanies the book:

�Posters are the only genre of graphic design that is explicitly created to be stuck on a wall,� Lupton told me in an email. �Many people are more comfortable displaying posters in their own homes or work spaces than they are with more formal or serious works of art. Posters are part of everyday life, so they feel approachable and real.�

Here are 27 jokes for graphic designers. Hat tip to Garr Reynolds.

An even better joke for graphic designers is the #DrunkTufte hashtag on Twitter.

In last month�s link roundup, I pointed to an article about the perils of bar graphs. This month, I�m pointing to a round-up of the reaction to it.

Quote of the month from Lindsay Waldrop:

That thing where you said you�d do a poster and then completely forget about it until the day before you leave. o.O

Kamis, 30 April 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for April 2015 - Si Bejo Science

for organizers link roundup

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While this blog is mainly about poster sessions, poster sessions happen in the larger context of academic conferences. I love conferences, and part of the reason I write this blog is so that people can have good experiences at those conference sessions. Those good experiences do not include harassment. That�s why this blog post by Timoth�e Poisot is this month�s must read:

Across all ecologists we surveyed, 37% witnessed harassment, and 24% experienced it, at least once, only taking into account what happens during scientific meetings. This� wow, this is a lot. ...

1 out of 3 people is not an epi-phenomenon.

The post also shows strong support for organizers to be much more active in dealing with harassment. If you�re involved in organizing a conference, there are steps you can take to make them better and more welcoming. Take them.

I�ve often lamented that most posters are designed by amateurs. I have rarely seen a case for using professionals as compelling as this ad, which was a full page in several American newspapers:

It�s an attractive and well designed ad. Except for one thing.

The brain is backwards.

Not being able to get a brain the right way round is not the signal you want to send when you are trying to announce a �new era of discovery in brain research.� There are professionals who do medical illustration stuff for a living. Hire one. (Hat tip to Mo Costandi.)

The bar graph is a standard way of presenting data. A new PLOS Biology paper argues that it�s a bad way regardless of its ubiquity. Hat tip to Gaetan Burgio and Michael Hendricks.

Nevertheless, the humble bar chart is likely to remain a major workhorse for data presentation for a long time. Here is a short list of good tips. Hat tip to Garr Reynolds.

I Want Hue bills itself as a tool for �data scientists.� Its claims:

Distributing colors evenly, in a perceptively coherent space, constrained by user-friendly settings, to generate high quality custom palettes.

Looks interesting. Not sure why the colours jiggle when you make palettes, though. Hat tip to Dean Malmgren and Justin Kiggins.

I�ve always been skeptical when I�ve heard mathematicians and others wax rhapsodic about the �golden ratio.� This article calls it �design�s biggest myth,� and I��m inclined to agree. But maybe that�s just my confirmation bias. Hat tip to Tommy Leung.

Peter Newbury asked:

Conf poster style question: do you use present tense, as in �results are calculated by...� instead of �results were calculated by�?

This isn�t just a conference poster question, but a general scientific writing question. In general, any methods are in past tense, because you�re describing something that already happened. Results are often in present tense, because the effect you�re describing should be generalizable to past, present, and future situations. To put it another way, we write �E is equal to mc squared,� because it�s always true. You might write �E was equal to mc squared� if it was only true once.

Graphic designer Ellen Lupton has a book coming out in June that was an instant pre-order for me: How Posters Work.

Expect a review as soon as it arrives and I devour it, as I surely will. There is an art exhibit to check out if you�re in the New York area.

Haas Unica is an old typeface that has been made new again. It�s the sort of sans serif workhorse that works well in posters. Hat tip to Timoth�e Poisot and Genegeek.

Jarrett Fuller ruminates on his love of all sorts of posters, not just academic ones.

Throughout history, you could group posters into three purposes: to inform, to persuade or encourage, and to commemorate. Sometimes it straddles the lines between each of these, but the poster�s purpose must always involve one of them.

Alex Holcombe wants you to know this.

Each word you put on your poster reduces conference-attendee approaches by 0.2%. People need to know my invented statistic.

Now they know, Alex. Now they know.

Kamis, 26 Maret 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for March 2015 - Si Bejo Science

link roundup

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It�s hard to ignore an article that claims to have found the �best poster ever made.� It�s below, and you can read more about the author�s approach here. Hat tip to Catherine Scott.