They don’t do encores, and they take the stage at the decidedly un-rock ‘n’ roll hour of 4 p.m. But some science speakers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been getting the rock-star treatment in one area.
To promote its distinguished seminar series, the university’s biology department creates custom posters resembling those used to advertise rock concerts.
Bob Goldstein, a biologist who designs the posters on his computer, says he was inspired by concert posters for such local musical acts as Superchunk and Joe Romeo.
“It’s amazing to see how much effort goes into them,” he says.
Mr. Goldstein used images of sea monkeys for a forthcoming lecture on suspended animation by Mark B. Roth, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. For a lecture on the fossil record of rain forests in Patagonia, Argentina, Mr. Goldstein used a picture of a fossilized plant from a paper by the speaker, Peter Wilf, an associate professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.
One challenge, Mr. Goldstein says, is providing enough information about the lecture while not interfering with the design. He stopped listing the speakers’ institutional affiliations to reduce the amount of text, but given the tenor of the posters, the change works.
“If these are rock stars, it doesn’t matter where they come from,” he says. “They’re bigger than their universities.”
He sends a few copies of each poster to the speakers before their talks and says most have been amused.
Mr. Wilf still displays several copies of the flier for his seminar. “I’ve given a lot of talks,” he says, “and it’s the nicest poster I’ve ever seen.”
Mr. Goldstein, who started designing the posters several years ago, used to pay out of his own pocket to have the Merch, a design shop in nearby Carrboro, screen-print about 50 copies for each lecture. But they became so popular that the biology department added them to the budget.
“I think that people recognize that these are special talks because of the posters,” the professor says.
Mr. Goldstein was happy to see his posters featured recently on the blog Boing Boing but says the best recognition comes in a different form: “I got really excited when they got stolen.”
