Tag Archives: aesthetics

Templates for better posters

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There’s been a frenzy of discussion on Twitter this summer about conference poster design (see #betterposter, #betterposters, #butterposter) so perhaps it’s a good time to re-share my Powerpoint templates. If you’re new to posters please see my page, “Designing conference posters” for details.

Below is a standard horizontal template. I recommend 500-800 words and 1 or 2 graphics that are understandable without you needing to explain them.

poster-template-horizontal-1-purrington

Note that there is no requirement for the text boxes to have a line around them — it’s easy to set line width to zero. And if you want to delete the background color (gray, here), you can eliminate the “rectangles within rectangles” look. Totally up to you.

If you want to include a QR code, put it at the bottom so that it doesn’t distract from your interesting graphs and illustrations. Like this:

But be cautious about including a QR code. By design it invites a viewer to fire up their camera phone, and I’d wager that most will also take a pic of your entire poster. So skip the QR code if you don’t want people to take pics of your poster. A compromise is to print business cards that have the QR code (as well as poster title, your name, your email address) and then leave them in an envelope pinned next to your poster (“please take one!”).

Here’s a template that moves the Literature cited, Acknowledgements, and Further information to the far right column … which causes the Materials & methods and Results areas to have more room. But the Conclusions box gets squished (such is geometry).

poster-template-horizontal-2-purrington

Here’s a template that might work for a humanities topic. I’ve chosen to have a question/result/conclusion flow (from left to right) inside the main arena, but you can always rearrange. There are also no rules about section names — just redo those, too.

poster-template-horizontal-3-purrington

The final template is a portrait-style one. For this orientation I think it’s critical to put the least important sections on the very bottom (that position is really hard to read without stooping).

poster-template-vertical-purrington

If you’d like to read an article about the better posters frenzy, here’s one from Inside Higher Education in which I’m quoted a few times.

Shaving your legs to deter ticks

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People shave their legs for a variety of reasons: to look younger, to look less like men, to show off tattoos, to show off muscle definition, to improve athletic performance, to facilitate post-accident wound cleaning (cyclists), and, apparently, to get a pleasurable sensory overload when wearing clothing. But can shaving also protect you from ticks?

I became curious this week after watching this dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis) crawl up my leg:

Here are some reasons why I think shaving would protect from ticks:

  1. Ticks can grip hair, so if you are hairless they can’t climb as fast.
  2. If you have hairless legs you can most likely better feel them crawling up your leg.
  3. When you remove all your leg hair you are removing a lot of sensory distractions caused by wind (experiment on swimmers) and thus you can zero in on things crawling on you.
  4. Without hair, small ticks are much easier to spot. Also easier for others to spot, in case people are ogling your legs.

No experiments on this topic have been done, but I found three relevant snippets on the internet:

  • “One thing that helps is shaving your legs. Not a foolproof way but I would say it reduces them critters by 80%, maybe more. I noticed that when my wife and I were out and she had none, I had around 14 that day.” source
  • “As an experiment I shaved my legs before riding point to point at lbl with KRS and a few others. It was tick season. After 40+ miles of riding I had 1 tick on my sock. Along the way KRS pulled OVER 15 ticks. We rode the same route at the same pace. I’ve kept the hair off ever since.”  source
  • “I’d say its mostly impractical. Although, I know many trail runners (including myself sometimes in the summer) do it to prevent ticks from attaching.” source

One experiment that needs to be done is to count the numbers of ticks on a group of people out for a walk, some of whom shave. But at least in the United States, that would break down to men versus women, and males smell worse than women and thus might attract more ticks, regardless of hirsuteness. And men are usually larger, so there’s the surface area thing that goes against guys, too. So it would be far better to recruit a group of hairy-legged people and ask them to shave just one leg, then march around a field known to have ticks. An ideal group for this experiment might be a men’s swim team right before the season begins. I.e., they all have hairy legs but will likely shave them for the season … so they won’t care. Would be crazy photogenic and fun. Plus great team-building exercise. Would get the college on the evening news I’m sure.

A simpler design might be to just have a motivated group of people (perhaps students in a field ecology course?) conduct tick races on shaved vs unshaved legs. You just need to start them on the ankles and have participants hold still while the ticks make their ascents. That would be equally photogenic and fun, I think.

If somebody does go ahead and conducts this experiment, the next step would be get the CDC to add a shaving recommendation to their tick page. The reaction to that would be really entertaining.