Today’s contributer is Antonia Hadjimichael. She sent a pair, presented in no particular order. They were both presented at the American Geophysical Union in the same year. You can click the enlarge the first...
Antonia wrote:
I don’t get to do posters often and it was an exciting challenge!
For someone who doesn’t do posters often, she certainly rose to the challenge! What strikes me about both is that these show better than average design choices. It’s clear from the colours, and the integration of text and graphics.
Antonia did have a couple of constraints in creating these. The project’s sponsor wanted the logo on the top left and mandated the blue-green-blue banner.
I was surprised by the word count. The first poster is about 800 words, and the second is about 700. That’s probably around average for this conference (Faulkes 2023), but because the main text is set quite small, I would have guessed the word count to be well over a thousand. I would look for places on both to reclaim space and increase text size.
I do appreciate the effort to make the first poster more skimmable by bolding for emphasis.
Let’s continue with top poster for a minute. Antonia has tried a couple of other things to increase the readability.
The poster do not use the common “Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion” format, which is good. I recently wrote about the “complete assertion headings” format, and this comes very close to that style. “Regional-scale model underrepresents sub-basin variability” is a clear statement. “Modeling across scales,” though, is a fragment, and not as helpful.
Another way the poster tries to make itself more readable is by including a “Main findings” section. Excellent idea! But the “Main findings” section is too subdued visually.
Look at the colour, weight, and case of “Main findings”: low contrast, thin stroke, sentence case.
Look at the colour, weight, and case of the other headings: high contrast, bold, and ALL CAPS.
The callout box for the “Main findings” helps, but it’s not enough. The low visibility heading and low value right corner makes this easy to overlook.
Let’s go on to the second poster.
Like the first poster, this one has a lot of visual complexity.
The poster tries to provide signposts about the order that it is meant to be read in. It works! It works with maybe one exception.
The placement of “This study addresses two questions” suggests it’s the second section of the poster.
But the numbered circular arrow leads to a graph, which overlaps with the callout, “This study addresses two questions.” The overlap signals that it’s part of the callout, read before you start at the number 1 end of the arrow. But being at the end of the arrow suggests the graph is to be read last.
The lower left corner is another place that has a lot going on. Methods are always one of those things that people are reluctant to cut. I appreciate the effort to convey the methodology visually, but I am not sure how much value the icons and detailed descriptions are bringing. Maybe “Use 20,000 core hours
to perform 600,000 model executions” is important, but as someone not in this space, it seems a little superfluous.
Likewise, I am not sure the SQL icon brings any more clarity than “SQL” written in the heading above it. Same goes for some of the other icons. I would try just having the headings for points 3 and 4, to clear up some space.
Thanks to Antoniafor sharing her work!
Related posts
Making statements with section headings on your conference poster
Reference
Faulkes Z. 2023. The “wall of text” visual structure of academic conference posters. Frontiers in Communication 8: 1063345. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1063345
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