The objective was to create a clean and modern flyer for the 48th Edition of the Liège Colloquium focused on the Submesoscale Processes (that I was co-organizing).

We really wanted to be independent from an external designer, otherwise we would have had to request them a change every time we got a new sponsor or when the conference deadlines changed.

Concept

The left-hand side illustration is a satellite image showing sub-mesoscale features on the sea surface. Three circular spots are enlarged to provide a higher-resolution view of the features, with the underlying idea of highlighting the multi-scale nature of the ocean dynamics. Finally, each of the enlarged illustrations are linked to the 12 main conference topics.

Realization

The flyer was created with the LaTeX typesetting system and the following packages:

• TikZ for the lines joining the different objects and for the magnifying glass effect,
• marvosym and fontawesome for the icons.

The source code (approx. 250 lines, including blank lines!) is available at https://github.com/gher-ulg/Liege-Colloquium-on-Ocean-Dynamics

Afterthoughts

Wasn’t an overkill to use LaTeX instead of the popular design tools (from the Adobe family for example)?

Part of the answer lies in the previous section: it is always cool to use free tools and share the code. For this type of work, LaTeX offers a really fine control of all the details (image and text positions, transparency) and TikZ has many nice features that can give an artistic touch to the final product.