Charlotte Payne, I love you! Well, not in that way. I love you for tweeting about posters in haiku. I think my favourite is this one, on de-extinction:

resurrect the lost?
can we really right our wrongs
with a tweaked dodo?

• • •

Here’s how Meredith Rawls made an award-winning poster. Here are a couple of points in her description that I like:

Re-read the abstract you submitted to the conference weeks ago. Is it overly ambitious? Totally off-base? No matter. Your poster is an opportunity to communicate what you’ve done as of TODAY.

Do you know what I did with all the words I wanted to put on my poster but didn’t? I used them in conversations, and they appear or will appear in papers.

And here’s said poster:


Very nice!

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A lot of people on Twitter were impressed by this poster:


This is a great example of how a poster can be, at one time, very simple and focused conceptually (there’s really only one figure, and no text elaborating introductions and methods and so on), and yet still show be very rich, showing a lot of data.

• • •

Nominee for “Best title of a poster, ever”, from Bryan Ward:


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More unsolicited recommendations. Kirsty McLeod reckons Alecia Carter makes “the best posters I’ve ever seen!” Here’s one, and it would certainly stand out at a conference:


Check out more of Alecia’s work here.

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Interesting presentation (in blog post) on whether design is too insular. Hat tip to Melissa Vaught.

• • •

Adam Calhoun lets us look into his creative process for designing a poster:


They all start like this.

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Dyslexie is a font intended to aid dyslexics. Their page shows lots of clever ideas to distinguish letters.


Hat tip to Margeaux and Asia Murphy.

• • •

The May 2018 issue of American Scientist has a nice little feature on the design of business cards by Henry Petroski. Excerpt:

It was because of incorporation into mechanical filing systems such as the Rolodex that business cards became standardized in size. A square or outsize card might have stuck out from the bunch, but it also might have made the system jam and become useless. Being different for the sake of being different can defeat the object of any design.

It runs on pages 144-147.

• • •

There is a font inspired by Charles Darwin’s handwriting.



Hat tip to Andy Farke.