Critique: Toads aren’t picky

I’m always pleased to show an award winning poster! This week’s poster is courtesy of Audrey Kelly. 

This poster won the Victor Hutchison Graduate Student Poster Award in Ecology, Natural History, Distibution, and Behavior, awarded by the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. (Whew, that’s a mouthful!) The award is given at the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

Audrey clearly did the editorial work on the text. This poster clocks in at around 400 words, which is just about perfect. Most people can read it in five minutes. Plus, the two column layout and colour choices are fine.

This was done in PowerPoint, and there are a few tells for this. 

The typeface? Calibri, the former Windows default.

Those callouts? Only PowerPoint makes those shapes.

Where I think the poster struggles slightly is with the two graphs of data. I’m reasonably sure they were created in a different software package in imported into PowerPoint. This can be seamless, but the seams show a little here.

1. The size of the graphs don’t quite match the available space, particularly on the right. 
2. Similarly, the white background makes the graph doesn’t match the look of the rest of the poster. 

Not a lot that can be done about those in PowerPoint. Those changes need to be made in the graphic software before importing them. Once the poster is mostly laid out, figure out the space available for the graphs and tweak the aspect ratios. Then the white background feels deliberate rather than accidental.

The blue in the bars and boxes of the graphs appearing in the title bar and pool diagram help tie the graphs in with the rest of the poster, however.

Just for the heck of it, I tried revising the poster. No major changes, just a few different choices to see how they would look.

I changed the typeface from the “fine but everyone has seen that Windows system default too often” Calibri to Jost. There is some other minor tweaking, like removing the bullet points and increasing the line spacing very slightly.

The callouts got a slightly different treatment. Because the callouts are similar to comic word balloons, I tried a handwritten typeface, Ready for Anything by Blambot. I tried to make the callouts more consistent with the size of the material they are next to.

I also filled the callouts with colour to make them stand out slightly more. It’s a slightly lightened shade of the background, so it still harmonizes. In retrospect, I would also have lightened up the lines around them. 

Here’s the before and after overlaid.

 

External links

Audrey Kelly on ORCiD 

Audrey Kelly on LinkedIn 

Critique: Biconcave backbones in 3-D!

Friend of the blog Mike Taylor gave me the okay to share this poster some time ago. Get out your 3-D glasses, and click to enlarge!

This poster has, dare I say, a touch of elegance to it.

Part of what gives this poster its style is the serif type. At a glance I was reasonably sure that it was not Time New Roman, which a closer inspection confirmed:

The downward serif on the “2” is very distinctive, and helps identify this as some form of Baskerville. This is an example of how doing something just slightly different leaves an impression.

Serifs can sometimes be difficult to see at a distance, but the large size and generous spacing keep it legible.

Big photograph taking up a lot of the space? Love it. When this is on the poster board, it should sit right at eye level.

The layout of the poster clearly shows this poster is meant to be read across in rows. The single continuous margin between the second and final rows signals that clearly.

What about the 3-D glasses I mentioned? It isn’t immediately obvious, but the photograph in the lower right corner can be viewed in 3-D using red-green glasses. I love it when posters can break into the third dimension, and it’s a shame that this technique is a bit tricky to implement. 

If you want to use this 3-D technique, there are two pain points. 

First, you need to get your own 3-D glasses, since conference goers are not likely to be carrying their own in their backpack. A super quick search shows that you can get them for as little as 45 cents or less, but you have to buy in bulk. Personally, I think that is a reasonably small fraction of what going to a conference costs.

Second, you need test the printer your poster will be printed from. Ink on paper may not look the same as light on a computer screen. To work well, the tint of the glasses has to match the colours on the printed image. The more exact the match of the colour on the lens to the colour on the paper, the better. I suggest making a small version of the 3-D image that can be printed alone to test how it looks with your glasses, so you don’t have to print the entire poster.

Thank you, Mike, for sharing! 

Related posts

Critique: Dinosaur necks 

External links

The “Biconcavoposeidon” poster is published  

Baskerville vs. Times New Roman 

Critique: Minimalist RNA

I spotted today’s poster when researching the Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science conference for the June link roundup. I reached out to its creator, Jakub Zeman, who sent along a copy and how he made it. Click to enlarge!

I’ll let Jakub tell the story from here (lightly edited). 

Our model focuses on how pluripotent stem cells develop into cardiomyocytes. Cells make multiple decisions over several days to become the correct cell type. My research explores how this is regulated at the translation level. Many processes signal to ribosomes the need for specific proteins to be made. We believe that ribosomes are the key decision-makers, producing those proteins in the right quantities at the right time. Thus, the ribosome is a central element in my poster.

I had previously experimented with the #BetterPoster concept, but for this special conference (Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science), I decided to take it to the next level. 

I was focused on making figures for our latest manuscript, so I opted for simple vector graphics and minimal charts to illustrate my story. 

The ribosome is complex, but can be simplified to a basic shape that represents large and small subunits. I added a ribbon symbolising the newly formed protein. The mRNA molecule is usually depicted as a straight line passing through the ribosome, but this time, I represented it with an interface between two differently coloured spaces.

In the top section, I showcased examples of cellular processes communicating with ribosomes.

In the bottom section, I presented a sequence of cell types recapitulating cardiac differentiation, along with two simple charts, and all other necessary details.

I chose a palette with four colours: two close ones for the background and two distinct ones for the ribosomal subunits. For different cell types, I created a sequential colour palette to illustrate how they get closer to becoming cardiomyocytes with each step.

I designed my poster using Affinity Designer on macOS, using different weights of Helvetica Neue to highlight key text while maintaining a clean and simple typography.

By limiting myself to simple shapes, few colours, and minimal charts, I created a poster that deviates significantly from a traditional scientific poster. But I use a poster as a visual aid to tell my story, aiming to engage viewers and encourage interaction, rather than having them silently read the dense text and charts.

I admire this poster’s boldness and simplicity. There is only one thing that I question: the rays of words surrounding the small subunit at the top. By the time you reach the rightmost phrase, “RNA modification,” you are reading almost upside down.

I made some similar text in PowerPoint.

 Kind of tough to read those three words and phrases on the right.

 One alternative: stack the letters.

But you are almost forced to use all caps here to prevent letters with descenders (like “g”) dropping down and running into adjacent letters. The variable width of the letters also contributes to making this hard to look at. And because we are not used to characters being stacked, these long words are hard to read. 

Second alternative:

I like this more than my stacked letter option. But it would be nice if there was an even number of words, because then you would have an even number facing each direction.  This, to me, is more readable even though it is less consistent.

Normally, consistency is a good thing! But sometimes readability is more important than consistency. Have a look at this soundtrack cover for an upcoming movie:

This logo has four names arranged in a circle. Three of the names (“Richards,” “Storm,” and “Storm”) have the bottom of the letters towards the center of a circle. But for the fourth name, “Grimm,” the top of the letters are towards the center of the circle. 

Thanks to Jakub for sharing his work! 

Related posts

Link roundup for June 2025