Excuse me? I need to be shot because you don't know how to use a printer?My posters always print out correctly.
If it works I can't see how it's a bad idea either.
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Creating a 46" x 40" conference poster
- Thread starter dolphin842
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If it works I can't see how it's a bad idea either.
Just because something works doesn't mean it's the right way to approach something. You could do the poster in Microsoft Paint and it would work. You could also draw it by hand, scan it in, and send it to the printer. That would also work. You could also cut out sheets of construction paper and use sorority-girl-style lettering with crayon pictures. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the way you should do it, although the latter would probably look better than 90% of the conference posters I've seen. Illustrator is not that hard to learn for basic things required for the average run of the mill poster conference, and the resulting poster is far better.
The OP mention he has some experience with PhotoShop, therefore Illustrator or InDesign would have small-to-nonexistant learning curve depending on what he's wanting to do, and certainly no more of a learning curve than trying to figure out where X is buried in Office 2007. Being able to have better colour management, finer control over vector graphics, linked files, etc, increase productivity immensely, and said features take only about 5-10 minutes to learn. Plus, as my understanding of the oh-so-confusing-you-have-to-actually-pay-to-have-your-articles-published-and-you-do-poster-presentations-instead-of-real-conference-proceedings-and-publishings (seriously, I don't understand it, I'm not being sarcastic here) science world goes, you'll be doing poster presentations probably almost one a month if you go into the field or go on for graduate studies, so learning Illustrator and other similar programs could in a short time result in some breathtaking poster displays to really capture attendees' attention.
I know I sound pissy about this, and it honestly is because I am. When you deal with literally 30 or more new people coming in to do posters every single day with charts that they've made in Paint and imported into PowerPoint who then yell at you because their charts or other picture came out blurry, you start to wish people would just do the right thing and hire a designer. Most people hire plumbers to do their plumbing, lawyers to handle legal issues, and architects to design houses, yet they do their own design work.
I should say though, the fact that the OP has even asked about the best approaches says he cares more about his presentation than most all the other science folk I've come in contact with, and ergo all the more power to him.
Hey now, it almost sounds like you're saying you know what you're talking about. That could get you in trouble around here .... People don't seem to like it when you say you have, dare I say it, experience! Trust me, I know.
That being said, I've been in PrePress, design and Large format for over 10 years, and you really hit the nail on the thumb.
Just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean you SHOULD. High-end graphics apps serve a distinct and necessary purpose, and professionals exist for a purpose. We've dedicated our time, money, blood, seat and tears into learning what we know, and yet, you're right, people seem to think that because they have a scanner hooked up to their crappy PC that they're suddenly a photo-editing expert, or because they have Paint they're a graphic designer. I have sharp knives at home; doesn't make me a surgeon.
This is what's most frustrating about this to us "old timers" we are professionals in science and engineering. Somehow, we spend a lot of time learning how to do drafting, page layout (since apparenty the journals no longer employ anyone that does that during the editing stage, so everything needs to be "camera ready"), etc... It's just a huge distraction to do something which we will never be as good as the professionals at.
At least if you are doing thinks in LaTeX you can largely divorce the look and feel from the content, but not so in the WYSIWYG tools.
B
You know I actually was talking to my dad about LaTeX and publishing the other day. He mentioned that it used to be very expensive to publish math articles, and most of the time the burden of payment would be with the article writer. Before LaTeX, they had to hire an specialised type-setter who would inevitably make mistakes, and the type setter and the writer would have to go through at least three or four revisions to get it right. Now though, it costs them virtually nothing to get a journal ready for publication after its articles have been reviewed.
In the literature world, we rarely have that many fancy layout features, and most journals just take straight-up RTF, Word, or WordPerfect files, there's not really a single common format. But, we don't pay anything to have our stuff published. If anything we pay a few bucks to cover the shipping expenses, but the rest is covered by the journal.
A friend of mine has to pay sometimes over a thousand dollars just to have a single colour figure included in one of his publications (he's in biomed research), and the research involved for each figures costs in the tens and hundreds of thousands. You'd think they could set aside a hundred or two to have a designer do the figures (which I'm going to be doing for them soon hehe).
There is a cost, though in the case of LaTeX can be fairly minimal. Training the authors to use LaTeX and become typesetters is a real cost. This is why I still end up using Word for any document I need to interact with anyone on, teaching them LaTeX would be more ineffective short term, even if the long term benefits might be big.
LaTeX is awesome, but it's not a panacea.
Physics journals user to take LaTeX input and translate it to their own tool so any minor tweaks were done at the editing stage, and there are now many journals that still will prefer Word input.
B
In astronomy, it really depends on the journal, but page fees can get pretty expensive. An article I published in Solar Physics was free unless I wanted color figures, which was then $25/page. But I think The Astrophysical Journal is more like $100/page. But that's what grants are for. Which of course has nothing to do with posters.
I wasn't saying the approach was right or wrong, however I think the "who ever suggested Powerpoint should be shot" remark to mkrishnan was a little over the top and out of line. The main point of my comment was the say that if it works for him and gets the desired results then what is the HUGE problem.
Whenever I am creating artwork it's done in either Photoshop or InDesign, that's what I use and I know they are industry standard tools, personally I don't use M$ Office I hate it. Lately I have been using Inkscape and Intaglio which are also very good tools for graphics work.
It wasn't meant to be a shot at him personally, and if it sounded that way I apologise. I meant the original person, ten years ago, who first thought up the idea should be. And that was a hyperbole at that.
NP, I hate M$ Office as well and 50% of my day consists of being sent very bad Powerpoint files that I can't salvage for screen designs let alone storyboard, I really do think most people are suckered into the "it has to be M$ Office or nothing" POV.
For the record I use Openoffice.org and iWork and have never had a problem with people opening files I have sent to them. I find as long as it's a PDF with CMYK in there I've had very little problems.
