Recently, I recently had to make a poster for the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Network Annual Symposium. I wanted to do something a bit different and which didn’t take up too much time to make, and one of the best things about being an early career research fellow is that I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to play around with concepts inside or outside of the lab. So I decided to take inspiration from XKCD’s “Thing Explainer” concept (https://xkcd.com/1133) and choose from only the 1000 most common English words to explain my research into upconversion nanoparticle blood oxygen sensors.
I based my word choice from the list of words given in “Thing Explainer” and permitted myself a few liberties for things like email addresses. My favourite phrases include “Learning offices who gave work go money” , this is sad and bad”, and “thin jacket of glass with pockets”.
The poster was actually surprisingly quick to put together, and saved me a lot of time-pressure stress. It went down well at the conference and it picked up a bit of attention on twitter too. I’d thoroughly encourage you to give it a try! I think it’d go down particularly well as an exercise as part of a science communication skills course.
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Advantages:
Fun to make.
Simple graphic style saves time.
Great exercise in science communication.
Twitter will love it.
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Disadvantages:
Poster competition judges may not appreciate your maverick style.
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P.S. Feel free to copy/adapt my poster just I copied/adapted XKCD’s idea.
P.P.S. I made it in PowerPoint using the ‘Corbel’ font. Basically I just tried to copy the style of Thing Explainer.
