No more slidesters, part 2: Three Publisher tips

I have used Microsoft Publisher a lot for posters, as I mentioned previously. I’m going to show three easy things that Publisher does well that are useful when making a conference poster.

Grids are a cinch

Grids are at the heart of successful poster design. Under “Arrange,” pick “Layout guides,” then pick the “Grid guides” tab.


From there, all you have to do is pick the number of columns you want to have, and the space between them. And you’ve now got an evenly spaced grid!


Setting up grid guidelines in other programs is rarely this painless. You usually have to do a lot of calculating to set up each individual guideline.

You can also set up rows in the same way. This is not as useful as often in posters, which are usually dominated by vertical divisions, rather than horizontal (apart from the title).

Once you’ve got columns, draw a single text box in each one and paste in your text. Because posters usually have many graphics, you’ll want to insert pictures, too. This is where another feature of Publisher comes in handy.

Text wraps around pictures

Many other programs either cannot wrap text automatically (like PowerPoint) or make you jump through hoops to get there. When you insert a picture into Publisher, the text will normally flow around it. If the picture is the same width as the column, the text will break and continue below it.


The default spacing is not particularly graceful, so it is worth fiddling with the settings after the picture is in so that the text isn’t too close to the picture.

Joining text across columns

Many people, particularly those working with PowerPoint, create their posters as a zillions small text boxes that almost invariably go out of alignment because there are so many of them, and they are all different widths. Publisher allows you to link text boxes into one continuous piece of text.

Click on a text box. If there is more text than will fit in the space, it will show an “overflow” symbol at the bottom. On the menu bar, there is a “Create Text Box Link” button. Click it, then bring the mouse down to the next column. The mouse icon will change to a bucket. Click it within the box to “pour” the overflowing text into the next column.


Continue this for each column. Once this is done, the text will automatically rescale through all the text boxes. For example, if you add a picture to text box one that displaces some of the text, the text will shift down automatically, through to the last linked text box. The same thing will also happen if you enlarge or reduce the text.

No more slidesters, part 1: The wrong tool for the job

Many people have discussed the deficiencies of “sliduments”: PowerPoint printouts that are given instead of actual, detailed prose documents. See also here.

Another misuse of PowerPoint is to use it to create large posters. My experience has been that PowerPoint is abysmally suited for this task. That said, I have not used the 2007 version of PowerPoint that was released along with Windows Vista, but I have suspicions that at least some of the problems I had are still true. The main reason I suspect this is that I deal with posters for HESTEC from our department every year for the last four. And every year I am horrified by the PowerPoint posters. People only do this because they know PowerPoint and think it’s “good enough” for the task. My reaction is much like that of William T. Riker: “‘Good enough’ never is.”

In the last version, PowerPoint was limited in how big a poster it can make (56 inches, according to here). Some conferences give several feet of space, and PowerPoint couldn't reach the large sizes.

PowerPoint is also wretched at typesetting and handling complex layouts. It’s harder to change even basic paragraph settings like line spacing in PowerPoint than Word. Perhaps the fatal flaw is that the heart of any poster layout should be a consistent grid, and setting up a grid in PowerPoint is very difficult. Consequently, I see many posters where I’m willing to bet that no two items on them are actually aligned. They’ve been roughly kinda sorta eyeballed.

Yet using PowerPoint is so entrenched for making posters that printers provide PowerPoint templates for clients and actually encourage the abominable practice.

Strangely, many who use PowerPoint have an much superior tool at their disposal: Publisher. It’s part of the standard Microsoft Office package, but not many people are aware of it. It uses many of the same commands and logic as the other Office software that people know, so its lack of popularity is all the more surprising. Publisher has its limitations, but the improvement over what one can do in PowerPoint is huge.

(Original version posted at NeuroDojo.)

Containment

Posters have to be self-contained, in two senses of the word. This is a major difference between posters and slides.

First, you only have a single canvas for a poster. Everything has to fit within that space. In contrast, it’s rare to have only one slide. Slides are gregarious things, preferring to appear in swarms. With digital slides now the norm, you effectively have infinite space (even though you see only one small section at a time).

Second, posters should be understandable when the presenter isn’t there to explain it. Slides are almost always intended to accompany a speaker, and explicitly serve as aids to a presentation. You never walk into a room at a conference where there’s just a series of projectors, with slides flicking by on auto advance.

Thus, a poster will always have more elements to consider than any one slide. This presents a bigger challenge to layout, and causes greater planning demands.

One of the biggest struggles in designing a poster is to decide how much can be removed without making it impossible for someone to understand the poster when the presenter isn’t around. Unfortunately, there are no easy rules of thumb to follow.

Periodic table of typefaces

This graphic puts a large number of fonts “at a glance.” Mimicking the periodic table of the elements is an interesting idea, although it’s more a gimmick than anything useful, unlike the periodic table of the elements, which reflects nature.

Found in the article, 40 Useful and Creative Infographics at Six Revisions. Many of the other graphs are worth looking at, particularly for the use of colour and the integration of text and graphics. Many may be too dense for posters, however.

No need to shout

As a scientist, I have to keep up with journals in my research field. For most journals, I get an RSS feed with the title and abstracts of journal articles. There is one journal, however, for which I respect the science, but hate their feed. Because they set all of their article titles in all capital letters:

HOW TO PREVENT CHEATING: A DIGESTIVE SPECIALIZATION TIES MUTUALISTIC PLANT-ANTS TO THEIR ANT-PLANT PARTNERS
EXTREME HOST PLANT CONSERVATISM DURING AT LEAST 20 MILLION YEARS OF HOST PLANT PURSUIT BY OAK GALLWASPS
GENETIC ARCHITECTURE FOR THE ADAPTIVE ORIGIN OF ANNUAL WILD RICE, ORYZA NIVARA
GENETIC DISTANCE BETWEEN SPECIES PREDICTS NOVEL TRAIT EXPRESSION IN THEIR HYBRIDS

Admit it, you didn’t read any of those. You skipped here to pick up the conversational thread, didn’t you? (In fairness, it’s not quite as bad in the RSS reader as they appear here, because there is a little space between entries in the reader.)

When I look at those article titles, I can feel my brain “gearing down” every time. Reading slows to a crawl. The experience drives me nuts. When I’m looking at the feed, most entries are irrelevant to me, so I skim, doing a quick search for topics that interest me.

And that is exactly the same situation I’m in during a poster presentation session. Yet many people insist on setting their poster titles in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

Compare the experience of reading this to the above. The titles are the same, and much could be done to improve the distinction between each title. Even so, just setting them in regular sentence case makes them they less likely to cause someone to skip over them immediately.

How to prevent cheating: A digestive specialization ties mutualistic plant-ants to their ant-plant partners
Extreme host plant conservatism during at least 20 million years of host plant pursuit by oak gallwasps
Genetic architecture for the adaptive origin of annual wild rice, Oryza nivara
Genetic distance between species predicts novel trait expression in their hybrids

Putting long sequences of test in all capital letters looks like you’re shouting. It’s as unpleasant an experience in type as it is in person.

If you are clear, you don’t have to be loud.

Related links

Questions About All Caps Setting, 29 September 2009, FontFeed blog.

Type crimes: Accidental sentences

In the last post, I talked about the power of proximity in structuring text and guiding readers through the text. Here’s an example of where that power of proximity has (unintentionally) been used for evil – or at least amusement – rather than good.


From Failblog.

A tiny little line is meant to divide the text to make it clear, but the proximity of the words overpowers it and rearranges two movies titles into one new sentence.

Here’s another example.

Don’t hold my hand

Erren and Bourne (2007) offer 10 tips for poster design. But as is often the case, there is a point I will contend. They write:

Guide the reader with arrows, numbering, or whatever else makes sense in getting them to move from one logical step to another. Try to do this guiding in an unusual and eye-catching way.

You should not have to guide your reader. Having to do so is indicates failure of design. Audience members at a research poster session are experienced readers, and are smart enough to know and follow the conventions established for the written English language that are all around them. Signs, magazines, newspapers, movie credits, comics, blogs, and get along perfectly well without “unusual and eye-catching” directives to show the next step in the sequence.

You can use layout so that people can read through your poster without resorting to explicit directives as to where to go next.

Let’s look at this page from the king of comics, Jack Kirby. It’s a grid of two columns and three rows of squares, and the spaces between panels don’t provide a clear clue to the reading sequence.

In theory, you could either read this as two top-to-bottom columns, or three left-to-right rows. If Kirby followed Erren and Bourne’s advice, there would be arrows running between the panels, or numbers in each panel, so that readers could follow this page.

Yet even young readers know to read the panels in rows.

The placement of the word balloons is the key to reading sequence. When you’re reading the first panel in the upper left corner, the next closest balloons are to the right, not down, thus encouraging the correct reading sequence. Many of Kirby's pages are laid out this way: The word balloons running almost straight across the top of each panel, in close proximity to each other. The artwork underneath distances the balloons from each other in the vertical dimension, making a reader less likely to wrongly follow down first instead of to the right.

And the moral of the story is: Put related objects close to each other.

In a poster, well defined white space can serve the role that art does here. Clear bands of uninterrupted white space can be strong cues to the reader as to the direction of the reading flow.

Reference

Erren, T., & Bourne, P. (2007). Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation PLoS Computational Biology, 3 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030102

Related links

How to: Balloon placement by maestro comics letterer, Todd Klein