How PowerPoint sabotages your poster (and how to fix it)

PowerPoint is the software most commonly used to make conference posters, by a long way. Here’s a few ways that PowerPoint works against you when you are creating a conference poster.

Size limits

PowerPoint will not make a page bigger than 56 inches along either edge. 

I have usually used a large format printer than is restricted to 42 inches along one side (usually poster height). But I have used many poster boards that are substantially more than 56 inches wide. Some poster boards are 96 inches wide. Which means a PowerPoint poster only uses 58% of the available space. I want to use all the space available to me!

Unfortunately, this cannot be fixed within PowerPoint. But there is a workaround.

Figure out the aspect ratio of your available space. Let’s say it’s 72 inches wide by 48 inches high (6 feet by 4 feet, a 2:3 aspect ratio). Divide 56 inches (PowerPoint’s max) by the longest edge (72 inches) to find the scale: 77.78%. Multiple 48 inches by 0.7778 to get the height in PowerPoint, 37.33 inches. 

(You could also use one of many resizing calculators on the web to do this math.)

In PowerPoint, create your custom size: 56 inches by 37.33 inches.

Export your final poster as a PDF. Then, when you print the PDF, you should have the option to select “Custom scale” to enlarge your poster to the final size you want.

Using the example above, 72 divided by 56 equals 128.57%.

PowerPoint resizes text and changes line spacing without telling you

Several PowerPoint templates have space for text with an option, “Shrink text on overflow” turned on. If you change text within that text box, PowerPoint will shrink text and / or change the line spacing to make the text fit in the box you drew. 

In some cases, the line spacing will come down to less than single spacing. Most accessibility guidelines strongly recommend more than single spacing, so coming down to a line space of 0.9 or 0.8 is just horrible for readability.

In a couple of templates, changes in one text box may automatically carry over to all the other boxes. So if one box is badly typeset, the other one will be, too.

When you put text into a box, sometimes a small little icon appears in the lower left side that will provide you with text fitting options.

PowerPoint’s rescaling means that you can have a hodgepodge of inconsistent sizes and spacing scattered over your poster. On a series of slides, this might not be so bad, because the audience only ever sees one slide at a time. But when all your pieces are text are visible at the same time, it becomes noticeable.

If you draw a text box on a blank slide, the default option is “Resize shape to fix text.” Not helpful if you have an exact space on your poster that you need to fill, like a single column.

Here’s where the autofit options are if you don’t see that pop-up icon.

You can turn off these autofit options, but there does not appear to be any way to make any one of them the default. You have to do it for each text box individually. This can be tedious, since a conference poster usually has many individual text boxes.

Automatic borders around text boxes

I mentioned this in a previous post, but it’s worth revisiting. Alignment is one of the basic elements of graphic design. PowerPoint makes it difficult to align text with edges of almost any other graphic element.

This can be fixed by setting margins to zero.

 Again, I’m not sure that there is a way to set zero as a default.

No filtering for fonts

PowerPoint lists all fonts alphabetically. It doesn’t allow you to select, say, the serif fonts or bold fonts or script fonts or variable fonts. When I am making a poster, I often want to use a sans serif for the main text, but I don’t want to use Arial or Helvetica or Calibri or Aptos again. So you spend more time scrolling through font options than if you could just select a checkbox for “Show sans serif fonts.”

There are font manager apps that can help with this. There is a list of font management apps on Wikipedia, and a quick search for font manager might reveal some more options.

Are these solutions complicated? Yes, but I’m not the one who decided to make a poster in PowerPoint. Don’t get me wrong: I love PowerPoint and use it as a quick graphics editor all the time, but you have got to know it’s limitations.

Canva revisited

I reviewed Canva back in 2020. Canva has introduced many new features since then, so here are a few quick updates on the platform. 

Size seems to have increased, but is still limited. I still can’t make a poster that’s 6 feet wide by 4 feet tall. But now it seems to have a limit on total area. I think when I reviewed it before, it had a hard limit on height and width. I can now make a poster that’s 6 feet wide by 2 feet tall, which I don't think I could before.

There are now university research poster templates. (They may have been there before, but I don’t think so.) Search the templates for “Research Posters” and you get about 20 or so different templates. 

 A couple are recognizably based on Mike Morrison’s billboard style posters.

 Many have the same boilerplate text that doubles as a guide.

How to make a research poster: A guide for students

Many technologies and breakthroughs would not be possible without research.
It is important to keep members of the community informed about the latest updates. One way to do that is through research posters.

Most of the templates are good on colour and typography. 

But most have too much fine text. 

Some have confusing layouts.

Canva has certainly improved as a platform for making conference posters. It would still not be my “go to” for posters, because the size limitations bother me.

Related posts 

Canva review

Artifical intelligence gives good poster advice

I asked a new natural language artificial intelligence (AI), ChatGPT, “What are some best practices for academic conference posters?”

This is the response from the AI:

There are several best practices that should be followed when creating an academic conference poster. These include:

1. Keep the poster simple and easy to read: Use clear and concise language, and avoid using too much text or complex graphics.

2. Use a clear structure: Organize the content of the poster into distinct sections, and use headings and subheadings to guide the reader through the poster.

3. Use a consistent font and font size: Choose a font and font size that is easy to read and consistent throughout the poster.

4. Use high-quality images and graphics: Use clear and high-resolution images and graphics to illustrate your points and make the poster visually appealing.

5. Leave space around the edges: Leave some white space around the edges of the poster to make it more readable and visually appealing.

6. Proofread the poster carefully: Before printing the poster, proofread it carefully to ensure that there are no spelling or grammar errors.

7. Practice presenting the poster: Practice presenting the poster to make sure that you can explain the key points clearly and concisely.

By following these best practices, you can create an effective and professional-looking academic conference poster.

This is good basic advice – and that alone is impressive. But the more I play around with this language AI, the more impressed I am. 

I asked it, “How can I make a bar graph in Python?” and it gave me usable code with good explanations.

I asked it how many songs Shirley Bassey sang for the James Bond films, and it listed all of them plus an unused demo.

I wrote, “Tell me the incubation period for covid in the style of a regency romance novel.” After a mundane answer, the next paragraphs went:

As the sun rose on a new day, the people of the kingdom went about their lives, unaware of the danger that lurked among them. Though they went about their daily routines, the invisible enemy had already taken hold in the bodies of some, silently incubating and waiting to reveal itself.

As the days passed, the incubation period came to an end for some, and the first symptoms of the illness began to appear. Coughs and fever, shortness of breath and fatigue, these were the signs of the novel coronavirus, and they struck fear into the hearts of all who saw them.

But even as the illness spread, the people of the kingdom did not give up hope. They followed the guidance of the wise and learned doctors, washing their hands and staying home, and slowly but surely, the incubation period came to an end for all. And as the last symptoms faded away, the kingdom was able to breathe a sigh of relief, grateful to have survived the ravages of the deadly virus.

The ability to ask ChatGPT for a certain style has since been removed, because it allowed people to bypass certain restrictions imposed on the AI.

This thing can do a lot.

Previously, I wrote that AI systems described for poster generation seemed very limited: you needed to have most of the analysis and writing done before you could get the expert AI to help you. But ChatGPT has changed my mind on that somewhat. 

Combine natural language AI with AI image generators like MidJourney and Dall-E (which made the image at right), and the landscape for communication is going to change very rapidly.

Related posts

Using artificial intelligence to create posters

Photo from “Classic Tracks: Shirley Bassey 'Goldfinger'”

Eye tracking

Eye tracking is a research tool that has not, as far as I know, been applied to conference posters yet.

In the past, this required some specialized, expensive equipment like custom glasses. But as with so many things, the increased access to laptop computers and high resolution digital cameras means that this is now within reach of many more people.

This blog post from a company that produces eye tracking software (iMotion) compiles and assesses ten free eye tracking tools. Unsurprisingly, it points out that the free stuff is more limited than the commercial stuff. Some of the links are already rotted out, but this is not a bad place to start.

Some other eye tracking options that only require webcams include:

• GazeRecorder 
• RealEye
• Eyevido

Eye tracking might provide a way for you to do a quick internal test of whether people are looking at what you think they are looking at on your poster.

And I’m sure there are some eye tracking research waiting to be done on conference posters. 

External links

10 free eye tracking software programs [Pros and Cons]

Eye tracking and usability: How does it work?

Using artificial intelligence to create posters

Back in February, a presentation at Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference proposed “PosterBot”: an artificial intelligence (AI) for making conference posters. 

The authors, Xu and Wan, pitch automated poster making as a way to “save time.” They do this in three steps.

(W)e propose an automatic poster generation system which takes three steps, namely section filtering, content extraction, and poster composition.

First, they use an existing natural language AI to analyze the text.

Then, they analyze the figure captions to extract more text to determine where figure belong. They use the captions because the images are too abstract for AI to categorize.

Finally, they stick the extracted content into one of several pre-defined templates. They have both landscape and portrait formats. Here’s an example of a poster generated using the bot.

It might not win a competition for attractiveness, but it’s hardly the worst thing ever to hang in a poster session, either.

If I understand correctly, they treat poster creation as a matter of data compression. You have a whole bunch of text and figures, and the problem is cutting it down to the essentials. It’s true that many poster creators do put too much stuff of a poster.

So for PosterBot to work at all – never mind it bringing gains in efficiency – the entire project has to be already written up. Complete text. The whole enchilada.

In my experience, this is rarely the case. Posters are often the first time that people are bringing a project together. There is no text for an AI to select the best bits from because there is no text at all.

As they say on Shark Tank:

 “For that reason, I’m out.’

PosterBot may be interesting to AI researchers, but it seems unlikely to be helpful to rank and file poster makers.

• • • • •

I had written everything above and had scheduled this post when, coincidentally, I stumbled across another paper that was trying to generate posters automatically (Jin et al. 2022). This one is called Text2Poster.

Text2Poster differs from PosterBot. PosterBot is specifically trying to create academic posters. Text2Poster is trying to generate posters for a wider range of purposes.

But both share the same general process: creating a poster by extracting information from a relatively complete set of text. For a typical poster maker, that is not going to be there. 

Both projects are fascinating from an artificial intelligence perspective of “What can we make software do?”, but they are unlikely to be helpful to most conference poster creators.

• • • • •

And I had written everything above when I stumbled across a third paper (Lopes et al. 2022) about using artificial intelligence to design things. one is the furthers afield from academic conference posters.

EvoDesigner uses an “evolutionary” approach to spit out a series of suggestions that a human designer can work with. The works are measured by their “fitness,” and sent directly to Adobe InDesign.

This one is less relevant, but more interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it “talks” directly with Adobe software, which is the existing industry standard for many. Second, it is a tool for idea generation, not final production creation.

That I stumbled across this series of papers in a matter of a couple of weeks shows that this is clearly going to be creating more options for conference poster creators going forward.

External links

Jin C, Xu H, Song R, Lu Z. 2022. Text2Poster: Laying out stylized texts on retrieved images. ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP43922.2022.9747465

Lopes D, Corriea J, Machado P. 2022. EvoDesigner: Towards aiding creativity in graphic design. Presented at Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design – 11th International Conference, EvoMUSART 2022, Held as Part of EvoStar 2022, Madrid, Spain, April 20-22, 2022, Proceedings, 2022, pp. 162-178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03789-4_11

Xu S, Wan X. 2022. PosterBot: A system for generating posters of scientific papers with neural models. https://www.aaai.org/AAAI22Papers/DEMO-00141-XuS.pdf (PDF)

Online posters at National Biotechnology Conference

This week, I am pleased to be speaking at the National Biotechnology Conference! I’ll be presenting on Thursday, 20 May, at 8:00 am Eastern Daylight Time on poster design.

Some of the conference content was available last week, so I went in and looked at how this meeting is handling posters.

As I’ve mentioned before, the concept of a “poster session” in an online space is an interesting thing. Different meetings have handled them in very different ways.

Below is a screenshot of one sample poster, just pulled by happenstance. I have blurred the title and authors, and at the preview scale, the rest is not really readable.

The conference provided a limited number of poster templates, so my focus is not on the poster design, but the viewer experience.

How it works is that when you click “View eposter,” a preview screen pops up that shows you an overview of the entire poster. 

You can see controls for the poster – menu, forward and backward arrows – down in the lower left corner.

If you read comics using an app like Comixology, the poster experience is rather like their “Guided view.” You step through each individual panel of the comic or poster, then advance to the next one.  In the poster situation, though, you have the option of playing narration.

The poster is scattered with little “sound” icons. These are obviously added in by the software, because the icons cover parts of text and graphs. There was clearly no consideration of where the icons would fit into the design.

Every section with an icon has a pre-recorded message.

When you click play, you can hear narration recorded by the presenter. There is no “autoplay” through the entire poster. You have to click to advance to each section.

Judging from a few posters picked haphazardly, if you just listen at normal presentation speed, it takes about six to eight minutes to listen to a presenter walk you through a poster.

Luckily, the “speedometer” icon allows you to play it faster (unspecified, but I think it might be 1.5×, 1.75× and 2× regular speed). A nice touch.

I have not made a comprehensive review of all posters, but I will say that sometimes listening to the narration is an odd experience. On text blocks, many presenters start reading the text exactly as written on the poster, but then deviate from it at unpredictable points. The transition from following along to trying to parse the difference between what is written and what is said is jarring. 

It feels a lot like people reading PowerPoint slides. And we know what crushing experience that is. Most people read faster than presenters talk. 

Eposters mimic one aspect of some paper posters. Despite seeing only one panel at a time, it’s often hard to read the text because people write too much stuff that is too small. Even when I’m viewing a a single panel full screen, I see sections that I cannot hope to read without learning in uncomfortably close to my screen.

You can also download the poster as a PDF.

So while this is technically a kind of interesting way of presenting, I’m still unsure why this should even be called a “poster.” In practice, it feels like it would be much more natural either to have people record slide talks or upload a single static document, like a manuscript.

External links

National Biotechnology Conference

BioRender announces PosterRender

“Darn it, I don’t have a blog post lined up this week. What am I going to write about...?”

[Checks Twitter]

psst @DoctorZen have you seen!?

[Sees]

“Well, that’s this week’s blog post sorted.” 

BioRender just announced a new project, PosterRender. This cloud-based software features automatic alignment and global colour schemes.

It’s rare that I get to say, “Big news in the conference poster world!” But this is big news in the conference poster world.

I knew the company was thinking about a project like this, because a BioRender staffer consulted me at one point about the poster making process. I probably didn’t help much! 

This announcement is getting thousands of likes and retweets. I am not going to lie when I say I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, that a successful company like BioRender is throwing its weight behind poster making is fantastic. This will be a great boon for many people. 

On the other hand, the first glance suggests that this fundamentally a souped up template, and I have consistently struggled with templates. Templates prevent people from falling in deep dark holes, but they also generate a certain sameness that can be bland. BioRender figures have a recognizable style.

I also have a bit of a frown because the announcement says this is for people “who spent way too long making poster.” This was also an explicit selling point of the “billboard” style poster, as I mentioned last week.

I don’t like the implication that posters aren’t worth spending time on. 

It reinforces the idea that posters are third-rate ways of presenting scientific information. I never see people say, “You’re spending too much time on writing.” Nobody begrudges a few hours spent on creating a journal article, because people recognize that good writing takes time. Posters are a critical first draft of the scientific record. Take them seriously, damnit.

But I’m probably like the music nerd arguing that vinyl records “sound better” when the rest of the world has moved to listening to streaming music. 

This is going to be a very big success for BioRender and help many people make more readable and more attractive posters than they could have on their own.

Early access to PosterRender is available here. And you better believe I have signed up! I am excite!

Hat tip to Catherine Scott.

External links

BioRender PosterRender early access sign-up

Review: DesignCap

Having reviewed a couple of online graphic editors this month, I got an email from a company, DesignCap, asking me to do a third. I created an account and logged in.

Wow, it’s a lot like Canva (reviewed last week, here). The user interface, the templates... these two services are clearly trying to occupy the same space.

Lots of features are locked for paid membership. You can only save five designs at a time. You are limited to five image uploads (that would be a big problem for many posters). You can export to JPG but not PNG or PDF. You can only expert in “Small” size.

Some features are missing entirely. There is no “space evenly” button, paid or not.

I try a poster template. They are all 420 by 594 mm (16.5 by 23 inches). That’s really the size of a flyer to me. Too small for a conference poster.

I tried to create a poster to a custom size. Hm, can’t enter size in inches, only pixels. And the maximum number of pixels is 4,000. Too small for a conference poster.

DesignCap can’t make a conference poster. We’re done here.

Canva review

TL;DR: Canva is great for simple things like an Instagram post, but I would hesitate to use it for a conference poster.

In January (before we knew that 2020 would be a dystopian hellscape, remember?), one of my contributors mentioned making a poster in Canva. I’ve been playing around with it on and off since then, and am here to report what I've learned.

Note: All my comments are based on the free version of Canva. There is a Canva Pro that you pay a subscription fee to use.

One big advantage of Canva is that this is a cross platform app. I suspect many people will run it in a desktop web browser (which seems to be its native form). But there’s a desktop version. There are tablet and smartphone versions for iOS and Android. With an account, your work is stored online and accessible from all your different devices.

This is nice, because it means you can sketch out designs away from your desk. You can tinker with a project standing in a socially distanced line to deal with the cable company.

The big selling point, I think, is the templates. I’ve been using Canva mainly for creating Instagram posts. Here’s one I made to promote a post from a couple of weeks ago:

This was derived from a haphazardly picked Canva template, removing the text, and replacing it. For quick, small, simple things like this, I like Canva a lot.

For more complex tasks like a poster, I like it less. When you look for a poster template, the size is 18 by 24 inches. Too small for a conference poster. You can create a custom size, as long as it’s smaller than 64.5 by 38.7 inches. That is smaller than I would like, but given that many conferences seem to be trying to squash posters into smaller and smaller space, it may be all you need.

Typography is a critical point for any poster. Navigating the font selection is challenging. First, fonts you use on your desktop are not on the Canva list. No Times Roman, Arial, Gill Sans, Helvetica.

Second, the list of fonts you have is kind of huge. Forget trying to scroll through them all to find one you like.Your best bet is to search with a term like “serif,” “slab,” or “semibold.”  How these are tagged is not clear to me. I’m not sure what makes these “decorative.”

Even with a search, you are often still presented with a damn long list to scroll through.

You can upload pictures from your computer (such as graphs, etc.). But there is no serious integration with standard desktop products like Microsoft Office. You can’t upload an Excel spreadsheet and get a graph from it. You will need to make a PNG, JPG, or SVG file to import into Canva.

You cannot create guidelines. Instead, there is a lot of automatic “snap to” features that help align elements. You can also space elements evenly by selecting multiple objects.

You can create a grid, but only sort of. You click “Elements” in the left sidebar, and search for “Grid.” You don’t get a grid in the usual sense of a series of lines diving the page. Instead, you get another template that divides up the page and lets you “drop” elements into those spaces.

Here is an image with a three column “grid” with pictures dropped in.

You can resize the grid, and it resizes everything within it giving different crops.

Notice that hairline space between elements has stayed the same. I can’t see anything that allows you to set margins between elements.

As far as I can tell, you cannot set anything in Canva to a certain size. You cannot easily take an image and force it to be six inches wide, say. For an Instagram post with maybe two to four elements, that’s not a problem. For a conference poster with maybe dozens of elements, that’s a problem. You may want to make sure all your text boxes and graphs are five inches wide, for example. That’s very difficult in Canva.

Related posts

Critique: Dangerous LDL

External links

Canva

How to make a 3-D poster

I love when media that are normally flat reach into the third dimension!

This week, I have a guest post from Kayla Hall, who created this poster. Click to enlarge!

I reached out to Kayla because all of her central images are in 3-D!

These images can be viewed in 3-D using the red-green glasses, which is the same technique that was used by filmmakers in the 1950s for movies like House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Even Alfred Hitchock made a 3-D movie: Dial “M” for Murder. Interest in 3-D movies was high for a few years, then petered out.

This red/green 3-D image is technically called an anaglyph. I’ve seen this technique used rarely, but consistently, at poster sessions through the years, but never had reason to make one myself. I wanted to know how it was done.

First of all, why? Kayla wrote (lightly edited):

I had a few reasons for choosing to display these specimens in 3-D:

Firstly, our previous publication characterized a skeletal structure in the fins of one family of stingrays, but that project solely used 2-D radiography. This was the first time we’ve been able to see this morphology in 3-D space and quantify all of the other aspects, such as thickness and curvature depth (for muscle attachment) of the primary cartilages across families.

Second, most of my work has used specimens from museum collections. Computerized tomography (CT) scanning allows us to gather all of the anatomical and morphological information without destructively sampling rare specimens. In fact, two of the stingrays displayed on the poster are actually new species to us, not previously included in our publication, so this was a first for visualizing and characterizing their anatomy. Scanning and viewing the Myliobatis specimen (#1) in 3-D space allowed us to add this new species to the list of individuals that lack the pectoral fin framework, as this is the only genus to exhibit variation in the presence/absence of this trait across species.

So that’s the why, but what about the how?

We used the Bruker micro-CT scanner, reconstructed the CT images using the program NRecon, and finally visualized the reconstruction in CTVox. CTVox is also the program I used to generate the 3-D images. They have a “Stereo viewing” button that converts the reconstruction into a 3-D image viewable with standard red-blue glasses.

You are not able to tweak the red-blue hues, but you can always toggle with the original histogram settings that produce the 3-D reconstruction to alter the color contrast.

I bought a multi-pack of basic red and blue glasses from an online retailer. (Search “anaglyph 3-D glasses” or just “3-D glasses.”- ZF)

Printing on matte paper works best for visualizing the 3-D work.

Easy once you know how!

And here Kayla shows off her results to Kelsi Rutledge and Jules Chabain.

You can produce the 3-D effect with just a high-quality graphic editor. In brief:

1. Get two images. You either need to take or find two pictures from slightly different viewpoints, or you need to edit an image to mimic the effect.
2. Merge the photos.
3. Remove the red from one image.
4. Remove green and/or blue from one image.
5. Crop the edges where they don’t overlap.

If you do this to a single image, however, you are creating an illusion. It isn’t “real data” in the sense that am image generated using a CT scan or two actual photographs. Be sure to label images with appropriate disclaimers!

External links

Diverse morphology in the forewings of flapping rays
How To Create Anaglyph 3D Images That Really Work!

How To Make Classic Red/Cyan 3D Photos Out of Any Image

You have options for numbers (PowerPoint users need not apply)

If you must  have a table on your poster, look into what options you have for your numbers. Many fonts have number variants.

Proportional numbers have skinny numbers (e.g., 1) and wide numbers (e.g., 0). Two numbers differ in width depending on what numbers they have. But tabular numbers are all the same width. So decimal places and dividers will line up if the numbers are lined up, as they are in a table.

If you have a table, it only makes sense to use tabular numbers if you can. They are explicitly designed to make your tables more readable! But tabular numbers will only do so if you follow a couple of other good practices:

• Make your numbers right aligned.
• Use the same number of decimal places in each column.

You may also find a couple of other options. numbers can be either lining numbers (all the same height) or oldstyle (with ascenders and descenders, like upper and lower-case letters). That means you have four options for many fonts.

In Microsoft Office, these options are sometimes buried. In Word, open Fonts and then look under the Advanced tab. In some Office components, number options are flat out unavailable. I’m looking at you, PowerPoint! The image in this post is a PowerPoint slide, but the numbers were made in a different graphics program (CorelDraw), exported to a WMF file, and then imported into PowerPoint.

To make things more confusing, which numbers a font shows by default are not standard. In the sample above, Corbel uses proportional numbers as its default, while Times New Roman uses tabular numbers as its default.

External links

Web typography: Designing tables to be read, not looked at.
Design better data tables

How to swash: using a font’s alternate glyphs, text styles, and numbers

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 “Typography” section.

In this case, the alternate glyphs are more dramatic forms of capital letters, with expressive swashes. So I check the “Swash” button, and the preview below shows the difference.

But wait! There’s more! Some fonts also come with alternative number forms, too. In that same section of the font menu, check the drop down options for “Number style.”

This font has three alternates for numbers. Again, selecting one option immediately shows a preview.

You can get the alternate numbers in Word. Open the “Font” menu from the ribbon, click on the “Advanced” tab,and check the drop down options for “Number forms”:

Word also lets you get different “Stylistic sets” for the main text (straight versus curved lowercase “l” and “i”, for instance). But I still can’t get to the swashes, as far as I can tell.

PowerPoint doesn’t do any of those things.

I’ve seen some online instructions that say you can get to the swashes in Windows through the old Character Map app. In Windows 10, Character Map is located in the “Windows Accessories” folder,  under “All Apps.” But so far, I have not gotten those swashes to show up.

You can see a little bit of those swashes in action on the poster I recently presented at the American Society for Parasitologists meeting in San Antonio:

I have much more to say about the design of this poster (I was very happy with it), which I will talk about as soon as the paper is published. It’s already in the hands of editors, so I am hoping that won’t be long!

External links

How To Access All Glyphs In A Font
How do I access the alternate glyphs in my OpenType font?
Secret To Add Swashes + Extras to Your Fonts…. Use The Private Use Area in a Font

No more slidesters, part 7: Inkscape

Inkscape is a free software that creates vector-based illustrations. As such, it’s the freeware answer to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW.

Inkscape has been on my radar for some time, but I hadn’t had a chance to sit down and use it seriously until the second #SciFund poster class earlier this year. We had used Adobe Illustrator in round one of the class, but this year, we decided to let people try Inkscape in case they didn’t have access to Illustrator.

At one point, I had read that Inkscape followed some of the same conventions as CoredlDRAW rather than Illustrator. I’ve used CorelDRAW for a long time, so I expected to be able to pick up Inkscape quite quickly. This was about 50% right.

Drawing was reasonably straightforward. Making objects and layering was much like I had encountered in other programs. Making a grid was not intuitive, but I chalked that up to unfamiliarity and interference from previously learned software.

It was working with text that drove me nuts. On posters, you often have to work with paragraphs of text, so this was a major sticking point. In most graphics programs, you put text into a text box. In PowerPoint, there can be a lot of automatic resizing to make the text or box fit. In CorelDRAW, you can opt for “paragraph text” that fits inside a box you define.

In Inkscape, a regular text object forms a single line. A paragraph will make for a long line. You can put that text into a box, but the text and the shape are always two separate things. You have to create your text, create your shape, then flow the text into that shape.

Inkscape allows you to have text fit into any shape you choose, which seems quite powerful on the surface. But I was constantly struggling to have my text appear how I wanted it. Resizing the shape didn’t always treat the text in the way I expected, leading to weird placements. Rather than moving or resizing shapes, I would draw a new shape, cut the text out of the old one, then place the text into the new shape.

When you look at the Inkscape gallery, it’s clear you can get some fantastic results from this program. But when you look at the examples, you’ll notice very few of them have much text.

My experience with Inkscape makes me unlikely to use it again for posters in the near future. Microsoft Publisher remains my software tool of choice, hitting the sweet spot between power and ease of use.

Update: Luke on Twitter said:

Inkscape does have text boxes though – created by click and dragging the text tool. Resizing is trivial then!

I will look again, but still. I cannot figure out why I was fighting so much.

Related posts
No more slidesters, part 1: The wrong tool for the job
No more slidesters, part 3: Draw in the open
No more slidesters, part 4: Memory whiplash with Poster 8
No more slidesters, part 5: The specialist, PosterGenius 1.5
No more slidesters, part 6: Publisher 2010’s fall from grace
Text wrapping in Publisher, or, “Why are you still using PowerPoint for posters?”

External links

Inkscape
Inkscape manual

Critique: Making enzymes

Today’s contribution come from Ian Haydon, who is kind enough to share it with us. Click to enlarge!

Ian writes:

The attached poster won best in show at my departmental retreat last week. I think why this took best poster was that two of the judges commented that I “told a nice story” (at least when I talked them through the poster, not clear it's as evident as a static document)

I designed the entire thing in Google Slides.

I think that makes Ian’s poster a first. I don’t think I have ever shown a poster made in Google Slides on the blog before. Ian wrote:

I love Google’s web apps. I make all my presentations in Slides and use Docs for all word processing so I’m quite comfortable with the controls. They offer all the essential features I’d use in fuller apps like Powerpoint/Keynote/Word, plus they cut out all the junk fonts and themes that I’d never use anyway. The ability to access all my media from any device is a huge plus. The collaboration tools are also top notch. I shared this poster with labmates in comment-only mode to get feedback before printing, for example. And Google apps never crash on me.

The only trick to using Google Slides to make a poster in is setting up the slide size. File > Page Setup > Custom. This should be done before you do any work, because changing it later will cause everything to scale to the new slide size.

Once I am happy with the final poster design, I save it as a giant PDF and print that.

This poster is built on a solid foundation. It’s a three column layout with a clear reading order, and everything is big enough that it can easily pass the “arm’s length” test. The colours are consistent and relaxed.

I appreciate that the institutional affiliations in the title bar are widely spaced. That makes it easy to match the subscript behind the author’s name with the institution.

My main concern is with the amount of white space on this page. Everything fits. Nothing is touching, but nothing feels comfortable, either. It feels like:

For comparison, standard letter paper (8½ × 11”) usually has about a one inch margin. If this poster is shrunk down to about that size, 7½ × 10”, the margins would be something like an eighth of an inch. When we are so used to seeing documents with larger margins, tiny margins look weird, no matter how well organized everything is within them. I would try shrinking major elements of the poster by 90-95% to provide those wider margins.

I’m never a big fan of logos bookending the title. But the title here is short, at least, so the logos are not chewing up room the title needs. But my objection to having the logos in the title is compounded a bit by the right one, the stylized “P,” being repeated down in the right corner. Putting two logos down in the corner doesn’t quite work. First, one is left aligned, while the other is centered, creating some visual tension between them. Worse, the two don’t line up:

Some of the colours used to highlight phrases in the text are a bit cryptic. The colours seem to be referring to elements in adjacent images, but I’m always not sure how. In the example below, the highlighted gold text refers to “missing side chains,” but the yellow in the diagram below (the closest visual match) seems to show alpha helices that are present, not side chains that are missing.

This may reflect my own ignorance more than it represents a design flaw, however.

#SciFund poster class links

We’re in the thick of the #SciFund poster class now! One of the fun things for me about being involved is that we’re doing stuff that I haven’t covered in this blog.

In particular, Anthony Salvagno has written a lot about how to use Adobe Illustrator to make a poster. I had not used Illustrator before I started working on this class. It is powerful, but not simple. Anthony’s tips and suggestions are just the thing if you have been curious about using Illustrator for making posters.

You can download Illustrator and use the full version for free for 30 days.

I’m going to collect all the #SciFund poster class links here for archival purposes. As I post this, just two are up, but I will add the next three weeks as the become available.

#SciFund poster class links

Week 1: Focusing on message and getting started with Adobe Illustrator
Week 2: Developing a draft and building your wireframe with Illustrator
Week 3: Creating images and graphs
Week 4: Working with text
Week 5: The home stretch

Announcing the #SciFund poster class!

I’m very excited to announce a new poster making class, sponsored through the #SciFund Challenge!

#SciFund started out as an experiment in science crowdfunding, but has expanded its mission to include science communication and professional development.

In this class, you’ll learn basic design principles, be instructed in how to use Adobe Illustrator (a powerful, vector-based graphics kit), and build your communication skills. And yes, you will make a poster!

Because we want class participants to make something that is useful to them, we ask that you have a research project with data or a research proposal. This might be a project you are presenting at conference this summer, or, if you’re an early career academic, might be a proposal for a thesis or dissertation. We also ask that you have access to Adobe Illustrator.

The class runs five weeks, starting Sunday, 7 June 2015 and running through Saturday, 11 July 2015.

Unlike some online classes, where it’s just you and the computer, this one has lots of meeting time with moderators and other class participants. The main moderators will be Anthony Salvagno and me (Zen Faulkes). We expect participants will put in about 5 hours a week for their assignments. We will also have hangouts (group therapy for poster design) and some group work for review and feedback.

Participants should be generally available between 10:00 am and 10:00 pm Eastern time to be in class hangouts and other events. (Multiple time slots will be available to meet.)

People who successfully complete the course will be given a certificate of completion.

The cost will be $50, and registration will begin soon. The last #SciFund class on video making filled up, so watch this space, follow the #SciFund hashtag on Twitter, and the main #SciFund page for more details.

Update, 12 May 2015: You can now register here! More details here!