Link roundup for July 2025

It’s been a month. What has happened around conference poster sessions?

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The quest to perfect the online poster session continues!

Macarthur and Drude posted a slide deck with a brief explanation of how they created a small online poster session using ThingLink. This allows you to create an online space that people can navigate through, click buttons to bring up specific posters, and listen to a short recorded video presentation.

The slide deck doesn’t do justice to the experience, so I encourage you to visit their poster session. 

I tried this on my phone and laptop. Both worked well. I like the navigation for this session. I found it very intuitive and smooth.

I don’t like that the recorded presentations that I saw have small heads that often cover part of the poster, with no option to move them. I am not sure if there is any possibility for interaction between either the presenter and the audience or other audience members. 

Even on a larger screen, some poster titles are hard to read. This is a problem with the poster design, not a failure of the format. But this makes me worry slightly about whether this successful approach would scale to larger poster sessions. Browsing is an important aspect of poster sessions, and this set-up seems to make that difficult. If I want to get in close to a poster, I have to click that specific poster, maybe zoom to read the title, and possibly pause the recorded presentation.

Macarthur V, Drude F. 2025. Bringing research to life: an immersive virtual poster gallery. In: University of Cumbria Learning & Teaching Conference, 18 June 2025, University of Cumbria, Lancaster, UK (unpublished). https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8957

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A very robust finding about conferences is that oral presentations are more likely to become journal articles than poster presentations. But how much do conference organizers have their thumb on the scale?

A recent paper looking at the reporting of randomized clinical trials at conferences found, not a difference in publication, but a difference in the quality of project reported.

Poster abstracts had lower overall reporting quality scores compared to oral abstracts. This could be partly attributed to the more rigorous evaluation process of oral presentations by scientific committee. Given the limited number of podium slots and the high volume of submissions, it may be that higher-quality studies are selected for oral presentations.

Paheerathan S, Flitti D, Cobourne MT, Hua F, Pandis N, Seehra J. 2025. Reporting quality of randomized controlled trial abstracts presented at the European Orthodontic Society Congress between 2015–2024: has there been an improvement over time? European Journal of Orthodontics 47(4): cjaf039. https://doi.org/10.1093/ejo/cjaf039 

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S. Kamoun wrote a couple of blog posts one reasons to publish posters. I agree with most things, but warn against this:

Having a DOI for your poster allows you to include it in your CV under publications.

There is nothing special about a DOI that turns a conference poster into a publication. Many CVs I have seen have a separate section for publications and conference presentations. Trying to pass off the latter as the former will be seen as obvious puffery.

But maybe that was advice that ChatGPT dreamed up. Both of the posts below are written with “assistance” from ChatGPT. I appreciate the disclosure.

Kamoun S. 2023. Why you should publish your posters. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8154941 

Kamoun S. 2025 Why I’m skipping the Congress this year (And why you should still publish your posters). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15863849 

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Almost as old as the blog but new to me post on confusing comic page layouts.

 Always make it easy for a reader to know which way to look next.

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If you have ever wanted a Norman Romanesque look for your posters, may I direct you to the Historic Tale Construction Kit Bayeux.

Hat tip to Ian Coomber.

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I don’t have access to this article by Amy Pepper, but some of you might.

Pepper A. 2025. How to develop and present a conference poster. Nursing Older People. https://doi.org/10.7748/nop.2025.e1516 

I couldn’t help but notice while looking for this article that another article by Davina Calbraith came out in 2020 with the exact same title:

Calbraith D. 2020. How to develop and present a conference poster. Nursing Standard 35(9): 46-50. https://doi.org/10.7748/ns.2020.e11468

And it’s not just the title that causes déja vu. The “Reflective activity” for both articles is very similar. 

2020:

‘How to’ articles can help to update your practice and ensure it remains evidence based. Apply this
article to your practice. Reflect on and write a short account of:
1. How reading this article will improve your poster development or presentation skills.
2. How you could use this information to educate nursing students or colleagues wanting to develop
a conference poster.

2025:

‘How to’ articles can help to update your practice and ensure it remains evidence based. Apply this article to your practice. Reflect on and write a short account of:
• How this article might improve your practice when designing and presenting a conference poster.
• How you could use this information to educate nursing students or your colleagues on the appropriate technique and evidence base when designing and presenting a conference poster.

Maybe this is standard boilerplate in nursing journals? I don’t know.

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How to use peer review to improve student posters.

Emery KL, Shepard MD, Matthew SJ. 2025. The effectiveness of online peer-feedback
for group interaction and assessment quality in a high-enrolment and culturally diverse undergraduate
topic. in: 11th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’25). Valencia, 17-20 June 2025. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd25.2025.20129 and https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/files/162584869/Emery_Effectiveness_P2025.pdf 

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And finally, in “Cool things I haven’t seen done before”.

Biologist Chris Eckert is retiring. (Good luck and enjoy, fine sir!) So for his last professional poster at the 2025 meeting of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, what did he do?

He held a garage sale. 

 Brilliant! Hat tip to Andrea Wishart and credit to Janice Freedman for the photo.

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Thank you! Your next link roundup will be here on the last Thursday of August! 

Critique: Small town fungi goes to the big city

Today we have a trio of posters from Stephen Kutos. Click to enlarge!

This is the first of the posters chronologically, and already shows a lot of sophistication in the design. There are usually few white on black posters at large conferences, and they stand out from the pack. 

The poster has a clear visual hierarchy: the network diagrams get the most real estate, and there is a clear “What’s the story?” summary right next to it. 

The diagrams look like art. Abstract art, mind you, but they are visually striking and different than bar charts and scatter plots. But while they look great, I think they might have needed just one sentence to describe what they show, and how.

The methods get less space, and things like logos and QR codes are present but small and not distracting. (The QR code is no longer operational, though.)

A common problem of many posters is trying to fill every part of the poster with content. Stephen showed restraint by leaving space on either side of “So, what’s the story?”

The orange and blue are easily visible to someone with common colourblindness. Hooray for accessibility! I am a little concerned about whether there is enough contrast of the orange against the dark background, particularly in the title. That could be a different barrier to accessibility.

This poster was sent some time ago. When I reached out to check that it was still okay to show, Steve generously sent two more! 

From time to time, I have experimented with making a poster with the title on the left. Stephen manages it more successfully here than any of my attempts! And I love the split tree / mushroom graphic.

While the first poster might have leaned a little too far away from explanations, this one might lean a little too far into explanations. This comes in at about 700 words. Better than most, but this might be a bit tricky to read in five minutes. This poster also has a lot of small icons that need deciphering. There are not more graphs than the first poster, but the graphs are more complex.

Not sure if this is a PDF conversion issue, but a couple of elements needed more separation to avoid touching:

And here is number three: 

One of the nice things about seeing several posters from the same person or lab is that you can see common stylistic elements. This one pulls some features from the other two. It is reminiscent of the first in its structure and strong visual hierarchy (big summary up top, smaller data, still smaller methods, very small logos), and use of colour. It resembles the second from its use of icons throughout.

There is a big visual summary at the top, some smaller detailed data underneath, still smaller methods shown graphically, and the fine print neatly corralled at the bottom. The word count comes in at about 300, making this very manageable for a quick read.

Only a couple of things come to mind as things I’d like to try. The dotted lines used for the central row to organize the sampling sites and separate the graphs work better than solid lines, but I might have tried going even thinner. 

The colours work well, but they are a bit muted. I might have tried to make one of the main colours a bit brighter to add just a little visual pop; maybe the green. 

Thanks to Steve for sharing this set of fine work!

Critique: Toads aren’t picky

I’m always pleased to show an award winning poster! This week’s poster is courtesy of Audrey Kelly. 

This poster won the Victor Hutchison Graduate Student Poster Award in Ecology, Natural History, Distibution, and Behavior, awarded by the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. (Whew, that’s a mouthful!) The award is given at the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

Audrey clearly did the editorial work on the text. This poster clocks in at around 400 words, which is just about perfect. Most people can read it in five minutes. Plus, the two column layout and colour choices are fine.

This was done in PowerPoint, and there are a few tells for this. 

The typeface? Calibri, the former Windows default.

Those callouts? Only PowerPoint makes those shapes.

Where I think the poster struggles slightly is with the two graphs of data. I’m reasonably sure they were created in a different software package in imported into PowerPoint. This can be seamless, but the seams show a little here.

1. The size of the graphs don’t quite match the available space, particularly on the right. 
2. Similarly, the white background makes the graph doesn’t match the look of the rest of the poster. 

Not a lot that can be done about those in PowerPoint. Those changes need to be made in the graphic software before importing them. Once the poster is mostly laid out, figure out the space available for the graphs and tweak the aspect ratios. Then the white background feels deliberate rather than accidental.

The blue in the bars and boxes of the graphs appearing in the title bar and pool diagram help tie the graphs in with the rest of the poster, however.

Just for the heck of it, I tried revising the poster. No major changes, just a few different choices to see how they would look.

I changed the typeface from the “fine but everyone has seen that Windows system default too often” Calibri to Jost. There is some other minor tweaking, like removing the bullet points and increasing the line spacing very slightly.

The callouts got a slightly different treatment. Because the callouts are similar to comic word balloons, I tried a handwritten typeface, Ready for Anything by Blambot. I tried to make the callouts more consistent with the size of the material they are next to.

I also filled the callouts with colour to make them stand out slightly more. It’s a slightly lightened shade of the background, so it still harmonizes. In retrospect, I would also have lightened up the lines around them. 

Here’s the before and after overlaid.

 

External links

Audrey Kelly on ORCiD 

Audrey Kelly on LinkedIn 

Critique: Biconcave backbones in 3-D!

Friend of the blog Mike Taylor gave me the okay to share this poster some time ago. Get out your 3-D glasses, and click to enlarge!

This poster has, dare I say, a touch of elegance to it.

Part of what gives this poster its style is the serif type. At a glance I was reasonably sure that it was not Time New Roman, which a closer inspection confirmed:

The downward serif on the “2” is very distinctive, and helps identify this as some form of Baskerville. This is an example of how doing something just slightly different leaves an impression.

Serifs can sometimes be difficult to see at a distance, but the large size and generous spacing keep it legible.

Big photograph taking up a lot of the space? Love it. When this is on the poster board, it should sit right at eye level.

The layout of the poster clearly shows this poster is meant to be read across in rows. The single continuous margin between the second and final rows signals that clearly.

What about the 3-D glasses I mentioned? It isn’t immediately obvious, but the photograph in the lower right corner can be viewed in 3-D using red-green glasses. I love it when posters can break into the third dimension, and it’s a shame that this technique is a bit tricky to implement. 

If you want to use this 3-D technique, there are two pain points. 

First, you need to get your own 3-D glasses, since conference goers are not likely to be carrying their own in their backpack. A super quick search shows that you can get them for as little as 45 cents or less, but you have to buy in bulk. Personally, I think that is a reasonably small fraction of what going to a conference costs.

Second, you need test the printer your poster will be printed from. Ink on paper may not look the same as light on a computer screen. To work well, the tint of the glasses has to match the colours on the printed image. The more exact the match of the colour on the lens to the colour on the paper, the better. I suggest making a small version of the 3-D image that can be printed alone to test how it looks with your glasses, so you don’t have to print the entire poster.

Thank you, Mike, for sharing! 

Related posts

Critique: Dinosaur necks 

External links

The “Biconcavoposeidon” poster is published  

Baskerville vs. Times New Roman 

Critique: Minimalist RNA

I spotted today’s poster when researching the Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science conference for the June link roundup. I reached out to its creator, Jakub Zeman, who sent along a copy and how he made it. Click to enlarge!

I’ll let Jakub tell the story from here (lightly edited). 

Our model focuses on how pluripotent stem cells develop into cardiomyocytes. Cells make multiple decisions over several days to become the correct cell type. My research explores how this is regulated at the translation level. Many processes signal to ribosomes the need for specific proteins to be made. We believe that ribosomes are the key decision-makers, producing those proteins in the right quantities at the right time. Thus, the ribosome is a central element in my poster.

I had previously experimented with the #BetterPoster concept, but for this special conference (Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science), I decided to take it to the next level. 

I was focused on making figures for our latest manuscript, so I opted for simple vector graphics and minimal charts to illustrate my story. 

The ribosome is complex, but can be simplified to a basic shape that represents large and small subunits. I added a ribbon symbolising the newly formed protein. The mRNA molecule is usually depicted as a straight line passing through the ribosome, but this time, I represented it with an interface between two differently coloured spaces.

In the top section, I showcased examples of cellular processes communicating with ribosomes.

In the bottom section, I presented a sequence of cell types recapitulating cardiac differentiation, along with two simple charts, and all other necessary details.

I chose a palette with four colours: two close ones for the background and two distinct ones for the ribosomal subunits. For different cell types, I created a sequential colour palette to illustrate how they get closer to becoming cardiomyocytes with each step.

I designed my poster using Affinity Designer on macOS, using different weights of Helvetica Neue to highlight key text while maintaining a clean and simple typography.

By limiting myself to simple shapes, few colours, and minimal charts, I created a poster that deviates significantly from a traditional scientific poster. But I use a poster as a visual aid to tell my story, aiming to engage viewers and encourage interaction, rather than having them silently read the dense text and charts.

I admire this poster’s boldness and simplicity. There is only one thing that I question: the rays of words surrounding the small subunit at the top. By the time you reach the rightmost phrase, “RNA modification,” you are reading almost upside down.

I made some similar text in PowerPoint.

 Kind of tough to read those three words and phrases on the right.

 One alternative: stack the letters.

But you are almost forced to use all caps here to prevent letters with descenders (like “g”) dropping down and running into adjacent letters. The variable width of the letters also contributes to making this hard to look at. And because we are not used to characters being stacked, these long words are hard to read. 

Second alternative:

I like this more than my stacked letter option. But it would be nice if there was an even number of words, because then you would have an even number facing each direction.  This, to me, is more readable even though it is less consistent.

Normally, consistency is a good thing! But sometimes readability is more important than consistency. Have a look at this soundtrack cover for an upcoming movie:

This logo has four names arranged in a circle. Three of the names (“Richards,” “Storm,” and “Storm”) have the bottom of the letters towards the center of a circle. But for the fourth name, “Grimm,” the top of the letters are towards the center of the circle. 

Thanks to Jakub for sharing his work! 

Related posts

Link roundup for June 2025 

Link roundup for June 2025

Let’s see if I can get back into a regular rhythm of posting these!

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There continues to be a small group working on creating posters by computing methods.

A new preprint by Pang and colleagues not only dives into poster creation, with a program called PosterAgent, but how to evaluate computationally generated posters, called Paper2Poster. Existing poster assessment rubrics are not good for evaluating computationally generated posters, because the computer makes mistakes that humans don’t make.

(O)ur Paper2Poster pipeline, built on a fully open-source toolbox... surpasses existing GPT-4o–based multi-agent approaches on nearly all metrics while consuming 87% fewer tokens.

While they claim their Paper2Poster assessment rates posters similarly to humans, it’s worth noting their comparison is based on one human rating five posters.

Their technique involves converting completed academic papers to posters. Since most posters are made well before a paper is ready for publication, we are still a long way from something that will be useful to most poster makers. And I’m not sure large scale automation for poster creation is necessary.

Pang W, Lin KQ, Jian X, He X, Torr P. 2025. Paper2Poster: Towards multimodal poster automation from scientific papers. arXiv: arXiv:2505.21497. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21497

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Benedikt Ehinger  has created Illustrator templates for conference posters that are free to use. Here’s an example:

Because it’s in Illustrator, there are a couple of features that you might not find in other static templates. 

1. Box backgrounds adjust for titles.
2. Borders can be easily resized; the curves don’t change with rescaling.

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Staying with Benedikt for a moment, he also makes art from his graduate students’ theses. Examples:

 The plot above is made from the first 10.000 letters of the student’s thesis.

Benedikt writes:

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. 

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If you are teaching using conference posters, Stefanile has a paper that describes how to teach people how to present posters:

(T)he approach of preparing a poster, emphasized here, involved a collaborative effort between the presenter and their colleagues/mentor to properly prepare the poster, particularly emphasizing the use of consistent best practices when presenting the poster. 

Stefanile A. 2025. Designing and presenting an oral poster presentation for undergraduate students’ research. Natural Sciences Education 54: e70018. https://doi.org/10.1002/nse2.70018 

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Sticking with teaching, Nicola Koyama has built in some self-assessment practices that help students engage with the material. Excerpt:

Some of Nicola’s students aren’t keen at first, she says “I think they grumble having to do something. But then at the end... they’re excited to know whether they've judged their poster correctly.”

Koyama N. 2025. Know where you atand: How incentivized self-assessment transforms poster presentations. Liverpool John Moores University Student Experience Proceedings Special edition: Case studies in assessment and feedback design: https://doi.org/10.24377/studentexp3175

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I have frequently reference Nate Piekos and Blambot, one of my favourite supplier of comic style fonts, but I am not sure I have referred to his page of compiled lettering tips.

This line cheat may be helpful in some poster layout situations, where you might be able to gain a line back to make text fit into allotted spaces better.

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This next paper doesn’t mention posters directly, but is one of the best discussions I have ever read about the challenges of holding an online conference that feels like a conference and not a Zoom call. 

The problems are partly organizational. The organizers wanted real time events, not asynchronous ones. This meant figuring out events for many time zones.

The problems are partly technical. What software exists that can make people feel like they re in physical spaces that encourage the equivalent of hallway conversations? They describe an app called QiQoChat, which I have not heard of before.

The organizers also realized that they needed events that would bring people together. For one, they live music. 

This paper encourages me to think that a good online poster session is possible. Recommended.

Bastian M, Flatø EH, Baraitser L, Jordheim H, Salisbury L, van Dooren T. 2022. ‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality. Geo: Geography and Environment 9(2): e00114. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/geo2.114

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In two gynecology conferences, 46.8% of oral presentations were published compared to just 14.2% of poster presentations. As is common, there is no discussion of why this difference exists or whether tany steps should be taken to try to increase the amount of publications deriving from posters.

Rotem R, O’Leary BD, McCarthy CM, O’Reilly BA, O'Sullivan OE. From conference to journal: Analyzing the path to publication for EUGA and JOGS 2022 abstracts. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics: in press. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijgo.70319

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This conference report makes me regret that I wasn’t able to attend Woodstock of Biology² + Night Science (#TCTeAC on Bluesky).  Presenters got walk-up music, there was a wedding (!), questions people were too embarrassed to ask, and much more. Seen from a distance, it sounds like it feels like Science Online meetings used to. It sounds like a lot of fun was had on top of the science.

But. 

Poster session in the forest — because… why not?

 (Photo from Barak Rotblat on Bluesky.)

Although it is apprently a volleyball court in a forest.

(Photo by Nir Eynon.)

(Photo by Zoe Harrington on Bluesky.)

(Picture from Claire on Bluesky.)

Um. I, personally, can think of several reasons why not. I know some people would see one tiny woodlands creature and be, “THERE’S A BUG THAT’S IT I’M OUT.” 

Or slugs, for that matter. This photo...

Was accompanied by the text, “INNAPROPRIATE SLUG SONGS.” (Photo by ‪Valeriy Kutsyna.) 

And posters were burned? 

(Photo again from Claire on Bluesky.)

Not sure I can get behind that. Even if if it was voluntary.

The conference ended when police showed up.

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And that’s all for now! Thank you, as always, for your attention! 

Critique: Computing crocetin

This week's is courtesy of the extremely patient Dimitra Bezantakou. Dimitra was nice enough to say that she found the blog helpful as she was creating the poster below. Click to enlarge!

This is a common three column poster, but there are a few things that help set it apart.

Bolding key words and phrases in the introduction makes reading the text faster. The text has ample spacing, which also helps readability.

The methods are shown in a way that add some visual interest to the poster. There is a lot of text and anonymous graphs, so the blocks of colour were quite badly needed to stop the poster from being too monotone.

The title is the biggest thing on the poster. And while I am not excited about the logo to the left of the title, the subdued colour and size stop it from distracting from the title.

Wider margins might improve the look of the poster. As clean and orderly as the columns are, the space between the columns looks extremely tight. The graphs in the centre column are just too close to the text on either side. 

Here is a quick revision with the central graphics reduced to 95% of their original size:

This helps. Probably the same approach could be used to bring the text away from the edges of the page, which are also closer than readers might expect.