SPIE 2016 – Poster Done Too

And now the poster’s in the bag, too.

It’s not my most visually appealing poster, but the subject matter doesn’t really call for a lot of elaboration. It’s mostly a data dump of all the spectra I took over the past several months. Just for grins, the bar at the bottom is a gallery of all of the samples photographed with my NIR-converted A2200 point ‘n shoot. (Yes, this actually factors into the paper.)

The two columns on the left contain spectra from all of the samples, scaled from 0-50% reflectivity. The two columns on the right are where the good stuff is: With the exception of the bottom two graphs, it’s only the materials that reflected less than 10% of the light across the whole spectrum. That’s where the useful materials are.

So why include the others? Those are the ones to avoid! The paper wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t include them. Unfortunately, some of the materials we’ve been using for years for stray light control fell into the “avoid at all cost” columns. Bummer. But now we know better.

The poster is printed, and I shoved it in the mailing tube with all of the other posters from our group this morning. All that’s left now is to get my butt on a plane to Edinburgh and present the thing.

Hip hip hooray! Scotland, here I come!

Tom

SPIE Poster

As with most of the projects I do for work, the SPIE poster didn’t work out 100% as expected.  Once I started going through the photographs and diagrams I wanted to stick on the poster, and figured in the size everything had to be in order to be readable at a distance, that 36″x45″ started to look awfully small.  And no matter how neat I tried to make it, that background texture of snow was just distracting.  So out went the theme of “cold” and in came the theme of “I have no clue what I’m doing.”

So I ran with it.

I really didn’t know how I wanted to lay the poster out, so I gave up and didn’t.  The text blocks were set on a page I tore out of a notebook and scanned on our Xerox Workcentre printer.  The photos were set in Polaroid-like frames I’d used for the KAP talk I gave a couple of weeks ago.  (True Polaroid frames are taller than they are wide.  These were tweaked to fit the aspect ratio of the photos.)  The graph and diagram were superimposed over the graph paper letterhead we use at work, likewise scanned on the Xerox.  The only traditional object on the poster is a JPG reconstruction of our monitoring web site for this cryosystem.  If the poster looks scattered, it’s because I was, too.

But in talking to people around the company, the feedback I got was that the approach actually worked.  The whole job of the poster at a poster session is to draw someone’s interest long enough for them to come over and talk.  Even if they come over to ask what the @#$^ I was drinking when I made the poster, that’s good enough for me.  If they want to talk cryocoolers, that’s fine.  If they want to talk poster layout, that’s ok, too.

The best part was when I brought my 11″x17″ test print of the poster home last night.  One of my kids asked what it was.  “It’s…  It’s my science fair poster!”  And know what?  It’s true.

– Tom