Penny pinching poster printing

Cianna Piercey tweeted:

Has anyone ever printed a conference poster 24×36 (inches, I presume - ZF)? Is that way too small?

Just trying to save a little $$ on something that will only be used for 1 hour. 🙃

 My reaction to the initial question:

That seems small to me. 

Most conferences give you space at least 4 feet of space, either in width or in length. Some conferences give you much more. Unused space on the poster board makes you look like you’re not even trying.

But is it too small? It depends. At a large conference like Neuroscience or the American Geophysical Union, I would say definitely yes, that would be too small. The aisles are wide, people are far away, and it seems unlikely that you can make everything visible to someone walking by at a distance.

At big conferences, you can sometimes be presenting to four, five, or six people at a time. Having that many people circling the poster so they can see could make for uncomfortably close quarters.

But I’m also interested – and maybe a little concerned – by the reason to print the poster small: just to say some money.

Cianna’s Twitter bio indicates she is a doctoral student at Colorado State University. That university has an in house print shop called Fastprint. A resource page shows that many colleges have ways that allow many students to print research posters for free. I’m not sure if that covers Cianna’s particular case, but to be clear, that’s how it should be.

If you are a student, you should not be paying printing costs out of pocket in most cases. Your institution should pick up that cost.

It may not be obvious to you, a student, how to go about that. Research students should have a supervisor to advise them of how to get a poster printed, but sometimes that doesn’t always happen for one reason or another. 

Before you pay out of your own pocket, talk to your supervisor, department chair, or even college dean. These different offices often have little pots of money to support students and support student research, and asking for money to print a conference presentation should absolutely 💯 within the realm of what departments can pay for.

I also want to speak to the poster only being used for an hour. If that’s the length of the poster session, then someone needs to talk to the conference organizers. An hour is far too short for a poster session. An hour presentation slow might be okay, but the poster should up be and visible for people to view for several hours at least.

And there are many ways to re-use a poster! You should be proud enough of your work to display it in your department after the conference at the very least. Students like to read them while waiting.

Picking up a poster

A couple of years ago, I was out of my usual surrounds and up in the northeast of the US. I had a conference coming up, and no access to the department’s printing services. So I have a poster printed commercially by MegaPrint. They do a lot of research posters. 

I looked at the address, and realized it was... pretty close by, all things considered. Cheaper and more fun to get it instead of having it shipped by courier.

So I drove over and picked up the poster, because I was kind of curious to see a place that handled so many conference posters.

I missed the sign the first time and had to turn around and go back.

Their business is a little ways out of town, nestled into trees.

Inside, calm, unassuming, with rows of large format plotter printers.

I got a chance to talk briefly to their founder Jay (since retired) about how they got into doing so many research posters. A friend of his mentioned scientists were always making posters, so that became a big part of their business. 

And I got my poster!

It was nice to have a moment of connection to a business that has, in a quiet way, been so integral to so many presenters at scientific conferences.

The view from SICB 2020: Fabrics!

I recently attended the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in Austin (#SICB2020 on Twitter). I saw hundreds of posters spread across three days of poster sessions, and am here to tell you what sights my eyes have seen.

There seemed to be an uptick in the number of posters printed on fabric, “synthetic cloth,” and other foldable materials rather than traditional paper. I went through the first three poster sessions and tried to count every poster that was not on paper. About 10 percent of posters (82 of 774) were fabric or similar.

But what was interesting, though, was that different fabric posters looked different. Often quite different. This is something I’d noticed before, but this was the first time I thought to ask people where they got them printed.

I talked to dozens of people, and a few trends emerged.

Spoonflower was the most popular source for fabric posters by a long ways. They printed 25% of the posters that I was about confirmed the printer by talking to the presenter. I saw more posters that I suspected were by Spoonflower, but couldn’t find the presenter to ask.

Spoonflower was the most distinctive looking product. I was able to predict with high accuracy which posters had been printed by Spoonflower by the second poster session. Unfortunately, the distinctive look of Spoonflower posters was not necessarily a positive look. They almost all sagged, and badly.

Many people said they loved Spoonflower because it was cheap. The cost I heard most people quote was about US$20. I think this may be a good case of, “You get what you pay for.” You buy cheap, you get cheap, and it looks cheap.

Spoonflower also has many fabrics, and it was not always clear which people had used (maybe their satin?). Different fabrics will probably give different results.

In fact, one of the best looking fabric posters was a Spoonflower poster. It had almost no sagging on the board. The secret? Corinthia Black hemmed the poster to creating a more rigid seam that held its shape. Her poster was cotton, so she ironed it, and the cotton held up to the ironing well.

PosterSmith was the second most popular single vendor, but had half the number of punters (12.5%) as Spoonflower. Their posters tended to crease or wrinkle rather than sag. At least one person said their poster’s colours didn’t quite look the way they expected.

PosterPresentations, MakeSigns, Genigraphics, and possibly PosterPrint ^* each had one customer.

The biggest surprise from talking to presenters was how many fabric posters had been printed by their institutions. Over a quarter (29%) were done entirely on campus. This large fraction was not because one large institution sent a lot of people to this conference. The fraction was almost all single posters printed on site by their institutions.

I had not expected that many universities to invest in this sort of non-standard custom printing. But the variety of product was large, and each institution has its own printing quirks. One person said their campus-printed poster smelled a little like fish. (At a biology meeting, some might consider that a feature rather than a bug.)

Ten percent of posters were done by various local printers from where ever the presenter was from. People may use local printers more for SICB than many other conferences, because the meeting is held so soon in January. Many people cannot opt to print their posters on their campus, because all their facilities close for the December holidays.

About 15% of people I talked to did not know where there posters were printed! These were usually students, who designed the poster, but had handed the file over to their professor for printing.

While I felt a little embarrassed for asking about the poster printing rather than the science, many people were happy to talk about how they made their posters. One person said he was more excited to talk about how he made the poster than the project. The project was challenging and the error bars in his graphs were big. I told him, We’ve all had projects like that.”

• • • • •

This was the first SICB conference since the “billboard” style poster was introduced on YouTube last year. It was not a popular format in Texas, with less than half a percent (~0.3%) of posters using the style (3 of 774 posters over three sessions).

• • • • •

^* I say “Possibly” here, because I have “PosterPrint” in my notes, but the linked page appears only to offer canvas on frames, not fabric.

Fighting the fade

I get emails! Yesterday, I got email asking, “How can I stop posters from fading over time?” I’ve touched on this in the blog briefly, but did a little more digging.

I remembered from working with people who supervised our departmental plotter printers was that there were different inks available for the printer. Some were billed as more fade resistant than others.

But I quickly found the situation is more complicated than that, based on this page about consumer inkjet printers. The printer manufacturer and the paper and the ink are all important variables in determining fade resistance.

To start, there are various paper types. Microporous paper is more fade resistant that cast coated paper. Matte paper holds colour longer than glossy paper, according to this page.Which, again, is a trade off. Personally, I think glossy finishes looks sharper and better than matte finishes in the short term.

Ink types also come in a few different varieties. This page divided inks into dye- and pigment-based inks (pigment being more fade-resistant, because the colour comes from solid particles). This one further subdivided inks into water- and solvent- based (solvent being more fade-resistant). The trade off is that dye-based inks are brighter and look better in the short term. And there are even more types of inks.

To make matters worse, there is controversy about how to compare the longevity of printed materials. “Archival” is an advertising term that has no particular meaning consumers can rely on.

One independent testing agency, Wilhelm Imaging Research, as been working on these issues since at least 1998. A quick visit to their website is... not a quick visit to their website. There is a lot of material on their website, and it’s not organized in such a way you can quickly dip your toe in and grab some answers. It’s clearly a deep and ongoing issue.

Even knowing all of this, however, may not be information that the average conference goer can leverage for their own use. If you print in your department, the choice of printer, paper, and ink may not be up to you. Someone else probably handles purchasing and isn’t necessarily concerned about whether someone’s poster meets archival standards or not. If you are working with a commercial printer, the options they present to their customers might be limited.

The amount of fading can be reduced if you cover the poster. You might use some sort of lamination. You could frame your poster, but that will probably cost a lot more than the poster is worth.

There is only one partial solution for fading that I know: put up your poster someplace with dim light. That's why museums and art galleries are often dimly lit. If there’s no light, there’s no fading.

I know that’s not very helpful. Curse you, physics.

Related posts

Fade out

External links

Inkjet print longevity
Wilhelm Imaging Research