06 July 2023

The “No words” test: What does your poster say after you take away the words?

Posters are a visual medium.

You check if you’re using the visual aspect of the poster format effectively by taking away all the words.

Picture of conference poster with all text removed, leaving only graphs.

Without text, this poster by Recovery Health has nothing on it that tells you it has anything to do with health. It could be a biology poster, a political science poster, an archaeology poster, maybe even a chemistry or humanities poster.

Here are a few more examples of posters that I spotted on Twitter that, if you removed the words, could be about anything.

Two people standing by a green conference poster with text and graphs.

Poster tweeted by University of North Carolina Medicine.

One person standing by a green conference poster with text and graphs.

Poster tweeted by Rachel Cooper.

Once I started getting sensitized to this, it was surprising to me how many posters had no visual indications of what their topic was about. 

Look for a photograph. Look for an icon. Look for an illustration. Look for something that doesn't have to be read that cues in a viewer what the broad topic of your poster is.

“But my work is abstract and conceptual!” Look, Andy Pizza just published a book of illustrations of things that are literally invisible

Illustrations of invisible things: guts, hope, grief, dream, dark matter, vibe.

And David McCandless created an illustration of philosophical theories of mind. (Hat tip to Steve Stewart-Williams.)

Series of twelve heads, with different depictions of a theory of consciousness (e.g., substance dualism, epiphenomenalism, behaviourism, etc.)

There are more ways to give visual indications of the topic of your work than you might think at first.

1 comment:

  1. I would love if someone could get me an illustration of a drug regulatory submission.

    ReplyDelete

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