If you’ve read other blog posts here or followed us on Twitter, you’ve likely noticed that we kind of like parasites. A lot. And whether or not you can muster up the same fascination, it’s kind of hard to argue against their importance; roughly 40% of species on earth are parasitic, and as many as 75% of relationships in all food webs involve a parasitic interaction of some kind.
Read More »Muses: Parasite of the Day
I don’t often share quotes as a tweet or Facebook status, preferring to give real-time life updates, share interesting articles I’ve read about social media marketing or science, and of course post pictures of cats—but once in a while, a quote makes sense. Time and place, people—time and place.
Read More »Be careful what you read—Ebola
If you have a feed reader harvesting RSS feeds for your consumption, or are active in social media, you might have seen an increase in women-in-science-based activity around the middle of October each year. You may even have seen the name Ada Lovelace mentioned.
Read More »Ada who?—Why doing science like a girl is worth shouting aboutOctober 13th is International Plain Language Day (IPLDay), a celebration of clear communication and the plain language movement. In Vancouver, we celebrated IPLDay a week early at Communication Convergence, a conference that brought together communicators from different fields for an afternoon of discussion. I’m fairly new to the concept of plain language, and throughout the afternoon I began to reflect on how it fits in with my role as a science communicator.
Read More »International Plain Language DayWhether you’re in the initial stages of building your brand or you’re well established and undertaking an overhaul, a design style guide is well worth considering.
Read More »Design style guides: Why you need one and how to make one
I don’t know how other people are taught, but for a long time I thought that nuclear reactors generated energy through some borderline-mystical atomic process that I could never really comprehend. And that’s partly true. But if you skip the details of how fission actually works, its role in a power plant is actually pretty simple to understand: the reason we can use nuclear decay to generate power is that it releases heat. So it’s not really the mystical atoms as such that make nuclear power possible, but the comparatively mundane process of using heat to make steam to move turbines.
Read More »Treasures: Natural nuclear reactors
Typesetting and layout aren’t just important to how a document looks. They can also be vital to how easy it is to read. Content creators now have many options for handling these things themselves—everything from default themes in MS Word and Pages all the way up to TeX if you’re in a scientific field. But at Talk Science to Me, we still get a fair amount of work doing typesetting and layout, so I thought it would be worth explaining what you’re really paying for when you hire someone for these services, and what you can reasonably expect to get for your money.
Read More »Typesetting mattersI am amazed by what our designers can do. I copy-edit a document and send it to Talk Science to Me designers Mari Chijiiwa or Jeff Werner as a Word file, just blocks of black and white text for pages on end. Then they work their alchemical magic and return it as a beautiful PDF file, with colours, images, graphics, pull quotes and stylized headings.
The State of Sustainability Initiatives Review is a massive report, created every four years, by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, one of Talk Science to Me’s oldest clients. We were asked to copy-edit, design and proofread this epic masterpiece, weighing in at 365 pages. The design portion of the project, with its more than 400 figures, tables and images, was mine.
The SSI report, which evaluates voluntary sustainability initiatives in 10 major agricultural crops, is a massive undertaking of research and writing, and my task was to honour the content and create a logical, readable, accessible—i.e., well-designed—version for our client’s readers, which include experts in the field, laypeople and the media.
The central problem in the design process, which had to be completed—including working with the proofreader—in about a month, originated from a seemingly non-design-related question: who was providing content, and when were they delivering it?
Solve that problem well, and the report would be better designed for it.Read More »Coordinating cooks: Working with live designs