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