Flashes of Panic

Last night, I presented a paper in poster format to my Machine Learning class. Actually, about eight of us did; the class milled around the room, nodding distractedly as the poster presenters tried to distill eight- and ten-page blobs of theory into five minutes of talking with illustrations.

We didn’t have the facilities to print proper posters (one sheet, about three feet by four feet: think half a sheet of plywood.) Most people went by the alternate route of creating a bunch of slides (nine to twelve) in Powerpoint, printing the slides, and taping them up. I wanted a bit more consistency across my pages, plus I have a stated aversion to Powerpoint, so I made my “poster” in OmniGraffle.

OmniGraffle is a wonderful tool made mainly for building graphs; it comes with a bunch of “stencil” shapes for standard graphs like UML diagrams or network maps. In that way, it’s a lot more like Visio than Powerpoint, but in this case that’s its strength. It also allows the “canvas” for a single chart to spill over several pages, and that’s exactly what I did for this poster. It happens that I made the poster fit a series of discrete pages for ease of printing, but when I was working on it, I had all the pages sprawled out on my screen so I could see how they fit together.

Also, whenever I came in with a draft, the T.A. looked over the pages and said, “Can you use less text here? And here? Can you illustrate this?” I went back around two or three times adding color, trimming text, and generally cartoon-ifying the whole thing, until I felt like I was cutting important concepts.

I think I wound up with a very good-looking poster, and I thought it stood out among all the Powerpoint slides (though maybe I’ve spent more time looking at layouts than most CS grad students.) OmniGraffle wants to deal with layout elements, not text. It doesn’t lend itself to bulleted lists or large paragraphs. It’s possible that it took me too far in that direction, but I think it helped me.

(It has also been extraordinarily helpful in drawing DFAs and NFAs, first for my theory course and then for Compilers this fall.)

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