And so, I had a bit of experience with doing layout and some of the basics of graphic design. So I have worked at the student newspaper as an undergraduate, doing layout and so forth, pretty much for most of my undergraduate career. Now, to go back even further of what gave me the confidence/hubris to think that I would have anything reasonable to say is sort of twofold. There were a few websites that talked about it, just as here’s my advice as a blog post or something like that, but I thought there was much more to dig into. And I realized nobody else was talking about this on sort of an ongoing basis. You can go see an oral presentation at business conferences, which is keynotes, but you don’t go into a business convention and see poster presentation. And I sort of realized that there was an unfilled niche for discussions about conference posters, which are very much unique to academic and even more specifically, the scientific, academic world. ZF: So the book arose from a blog of the same name, which I started about 12 years ago, because I was seeing that there were other really good blogs out there about oral presentations, and there’s tons of books about oral presentations. Yeah, so where do you come from to get to this point about talking about and helping people and make Better Posters? I want to go back to the beginning really, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background, and maybe, if you can remember, like, the first poster that you created, and was it like how many people like their first graph or their first presentation was terrible, and they realized that there’s a better way. So that is one of the challenges of a poster is that it’s all in one, it has to be a complete little ship in the bottle to use an analogy, which is one of the things that makes it a very challenging format. Whereas like, I make a graph, and it’s an image file, I sort of post it, I’m done. And we will talk about more of this, but what I love about it is there’s a lot of aspects to data visualization that maybe not a lot of people think about, that you in the poster will have to think about a lot, like the actual layout of something. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff on visualization in this book. So Better Posters, which, of course, is a name that I – the title of the book I really appreciate. JS: Well, I don’t know, I mean, so here’s the book that we’re talking about. So I just wanted to apologize to any listeners right now. And I feel like, right off the bat, that I should put in a disclaimer that this interview, despite the name of the podcast, we’ll probably have no policy and very little viz. So here is my interview with Zen Faulkes. I hope you’ll enjoy the episode, hope you’ll enjoy the conversation, and I hope you’ll check out his book and all these things I’ve, of course, linked to on the show notes page. So we spend a bunch of time talking about all of those different aspects of his new book Better Posters. And then, we spend a bunch of time talking about what are good ways to lay posters out, what does it mean to actually stand there, what does he think about conference poster contests, something that I struggle with when it comes to data visualization contest. It’s quite an interesting experience, and Zen will talk a lot about that in the interview today about what it means actually to sit in this huge room of so many different people talking about their content. He talked about his interest in design, working with data academics, what it’s like to actually be in a conference poster session if you’ve never been to one. So we talk about Zen’s background, coming into this poster area. Even though it’s specific to this one part of data communication, I think there’s a lot going on here that a lot of us can learn about data communication.
I also think it happens to work for when you’re thinking about creating an infographic or presentation slides or data visualization. In it, Zen talks about all the things that are important to consider and do when you’re creating a poster for an academic conference. As you might suspect, I really like the name Better Posters, the title Better Posters. On this week’s episode of the show, I talk to Zen Faulkes, who is the author of the new book, Better Posters.
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