Critique: City bird, country bird

Today’s poster comes from Sam Hardman on Twitter, and is used with his permission. You can click to enlarge!

This poster pulls off a few things that could have been disasters, but work here because there is not a lot of stuff. Normally, I advocate either columns, or rows, but this one kind of has a mix, as shown by the reading order:

You read down, then across, down, then down and across, and so on. But because this poster is four simple quadrants, without a huge amount of text, you can grasp the order quickly.

The clear headlines, “The experiment” and “The results” effectively structure the poster into top and bottom halves, then the columns do the rest. I wondered if the lines were all the necessary, so I tried removing them:

The poster works without the horizontal lines on the bottom “Results” section. This reinforces my theory that generous white space is almost always better than black lines in creating sections on a poster.

The top section isn’t quite as clearly defined, because the author’s name and institution are a bit too prominent. They need more “down pop.” De-emphasizing those text sections does two things. First, they don’t compete with the title. Second, they create breathing room between the title and “The Experiment” section heading, which would more clearly delineate the top half of the poster.

 
Apart from some of these minor spacing details, this is a clean design that is very approachable and attractive.