Boxism

Boxes, more boxes, boxes within boxes, and boxes everywhere!

People making research posters seem to be obsessed with boxes. Walk through a poster session and you’ll find poster after poster where each section, sometimes each figure, is set apart by big, thick, heavy boxes.

Then there are those who draw a box around the entire poster, a box around the text column of the poster, a box around each graph of the poster, and the effect is much like staring at an image of a video camera pointed at its own monitor, a tunnel into some unknown dimension...

Don’t believe me? Here are just a few examples, picked because they were near the front of ePosters and the Pimp My Poster Flickr group. These are not particularly extreme examples; I just grabbed them to indicate how pervasive the drawing of boxes is.

Let’s start with this award-winning poster on ePosters (click to enlarge).

The boxes around the graphs are more subtle, because there is not a line around them, but the white against the coloured background still creates a box around the graph.

Here’s one from the Pimp My Poster group (click to enlarge).

These posters both have other issues besides the relentless boxism, but those are other issues for other times.

And just for the heck of it, one more from Some Beans, which doesn’t need my callouts to point out the box obsession:

Imagine how this blog would look if every paragraph was contained in its own little box. It wouldn’t be much fun to read.

Many posters would be substantially improved just by taking away the boxes, and using white space to separate everything instead of lines.

Boxes are usually a last-gasp attempt to enforce some sort of order upon a chaotic layout. Excessive use of boxes betrays the designer’s lack of a plan or a lack of confidence. To avoid descending into a Russian doll of boxes:

1. Start with a simple grid. Try three equal columns if flummoxed.
2. Make the margins between the columns wide. Clearly defined margins will help guide people in which way to read.
3. Make your material fit the grid; don’t change the grid to fit the material. You may have to go back and redo graphs to different proportions.

Boxes can be used to good effect. Boxes around entire columns, or callouts of highlights, can be attractive. But every single element does not have to be contained in its own box.

Invitation cards

Conferences are about meeting people and showing off your research. But the meeting people portion of the conference usually lasts a lot longer than the actual poster presentation session. Conferences being busy places, people may forget to come to your particular poster session.

Invite them to your poster.

Almost any office supply shop sells business card paper that can be run through a standard desktop printer. Spend the extra cash to get good ones that separate with clean edges. The packages will often give you the specific information for a template in Office that you can use for laying out the cards. If you put in a little bit of time, you’ll be able to get results that will be nearly indistinguishable from your institution’s professional printing. Click to enlarge the picture of the two cards below. One was done by my university’s in-house service; one I did at with my office computer and inkjet. (Sorry, no prizes for guessing which is which.)

Do one side with your normal contact information, like your name, affiliation, email address and so forth. Then, flip it over and on the back, print an invitation to come to your poster, with the title, time, and poster board number. It serves as a reminder during the conference, and helps people to get back in touch with you after the conference.

22 questions a designer should be able to answer

People are often encouraged to be “creative” in creating conference posters. This is fine, as long as you realize this:

Creativity is not design. Creativity has nothing to do with design. Creativity is bound by no laws, rules, or strictures… which is perhaps why it’s so intoxicating (sometimes to the point of delusion). Design, on the other hand, is based entirely on math, psychology, human perception, and a host of rigid rules and laws that can be broken by only a highly skilled few. Those unfamiliar with these laws and rules, and the associated sciences are by no definition designers.

This is taken from the Design View blog by Andy Rutledge. He goes on to lay out 22 questions that convey design principles, of which a small sample is shown here. The question: Which line communicates speed?

Read the quiz!

Not all of the questions will be relevant to laying out posters, of course, but many are. I suggest anyone thinking about posters look at #20 and #21.The picture below is from #21, which asks, “Which has a clear hierarchy of information, and why?”

I am not going to tell you how well I did. I’m a biologist, and while I am vain enough to think I know more about design than many other biologists, I’m not a professional designer, and am always trying to learn more.

Update, 6 May 2018: The original post is gone, but you can read it on the Wayback Machine.

Hat tip to Chris Atherton.

Critique: Directed protein evolution

I cannot recall with certainty where I encountered this poster, but it is archived here.

There’s not a lot of text on this poster (good), but the two very wide columns means that each line is very long and hard to track (bad). Worse, each clean columns dissolves into a mess of three smaller columns... (click to enlarge).

Once you get to the results section, there is no clear reading order. Dividing one column into a badly aligned trio of three columns is very confusing, because there are no clear signals as to whether I should start reading in columns or rows. Although I hate to suggest it, putting boxes around either the columns or rows might have helped give that cue. That there aren’t such boxes is surprising, given how many boxes there are (around the figures, coloured boxes around the main text).

The “long lines” problems resurface in the conclusions. It’s not clear if there is supposed to be one paragraph (probably advisable, given how few lines there are) or three. If three, indenting or separating would have helped.

Let’s see what happens when unnecessary ink, like extra boxes and unnecessary efforts at branding, is removed.

The revision doesn’t clear up the structural problems in the middle of the poster, but shows how much extra space could have been used to separate out the results.

From printer to posterboard

You’ve printed your big, beautiful poster and are ready to take it to the conference. What you want to get it there, good citizen, is a document tube. Or perhaps a blueprint tube... or a portfolio tube. The names vary.

Regardless, these wonderful little items seem to be a surprisingly rare commodity, if the number of times I’ve loaned mine to colleagues is any indication. This might be because they are often found more in specialty shops catering to graphic designers and artists, which academic researchers maybe don’t visit as often as they should.

I highly recommend that anyone who presents at conferences regularly get one of their own. Just remember to make sure that the length of the tube exceeds the width of your paper. For example, the printer I normally use for posters takes 42 inch paper, and I see many otherwise nice, snazzy tubes that are only 37 inches long.

I have not yet found any tubes that have a spot to include identifying information. I suggest attaching your name and contact information quite clearly on the tube, because as you get on a plane traveling to a major conference, several other people may have tubes like yours, and it would be a shame to walk away with someone else’s poster.

Review: Scientific Writing and Communication

In mid January, a copy of Scientific Writing and Communication arrived, quite unbidden, in my mailbox. Of course, the first thing I turned to was to flip through and see if there was anything on posters.

A little bit to my surprise, Chapter 27 is devoted to posters, although posters get less ink than talks, as is often the case. The chapter on posters run 16 pages, compared to 25 pages about talks.

The advice here is generally solid but basic. Much of it can be distilled down to make it visual, and make it big.

The text is broken into little fits and starts that encourages browsing rather than deep reading (very similar to Pechenik 2010). There are guidelines presented as section headings, bullet lists of “Dos” and “Don’ts,” examples (all with thumbs up icons next to them; there are no examples of bad posters in this chapter), a terminal preparation checklist, and finally a summary of all the guidelines... that also appeared as section headings.

The first guideline in the posters chapter, “Design your poster around your research question,” lists an abstract as a poster component. Weirdly, Hoffman later includes, “Do not use your conference abstract as text on the poster” on a list of “Don’ts,” before settling in on “Some posters have abstracts, some don’t” a few pages later. I appreciate that practices vary substantially from conference to conference, but the text here doesn’t make that point explicit.

The chapter contains two completed sample posters. One is a generic layout that is not very useful, featuring my favourite hot button, inconsistent alignment.

The title isn’t centered. Figure 1 is wider than 2, while Figure 3 is skinnier than 4. The horizontal spacing is also strange, with Figures 1 and 2 being closer than 3 and 4. The references box is wider than everything above it and intrudes into the column to its left. And I have no idea what those shadowboxes around the figures are supposed to be.

The other example is an actual poster. It looks like it is quite a good poster, but it’s printed rather small, so it’s difficult to pick up some of the details. The book is printed in black and white throughout, though, and the original poster was in colour. It makes the annotation, “coloring is appealing,” somewhat unhelpful. Indeed, many of the examples would have been enhanced if they could have been printed in colour; they look a bit muddy on they page.

One section provides a list on online resources, dated to October 2009. None of the three links provided as resources on how to use software to create posters worked.

• Creating a large-format poster in PowerPoint: Page will not load
• Creating a poster using MS PowerPoint: Missing
• Poster presentations using FrameMaker: Missing

I fared better with the pages listed under “Other useful links,” but even one of those had moved. Plus, they all have horrible, long URLs. For those who don’t want to have to type them in yourself, here they are:

• Expanded guidelines for giving a poster presentation: http://www.asp.org/education/howto_onPosters.html
• Poster presentation of research work: http://lorien.ncl.ac.uk/ming/dept/tips/present/posters.htm
• Tips for effective poster presentations: http://www.osti.gov/em52/workshop/tips-exhibits.html
• How to create a poster that graphically communicates your message: http://www.bio.miami.edu/ktosney/file/PosterHome.html
• Guidelines for designing and writing a scientific poster: http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/posteradvice.htm (Update: 8 January 2013: This link is now dead. Advice from author Colin Purrington can be found here.)
• How to make a great poster using PowerPoint: http://wic.library.upenn.edu/workshops/posterPPT.html Differs from link in book
• How to make a great poster: http://aspb.org/education/poster.cfm

I am picking on only one short chapter out of a book that runs close to 700 pages. The stated purpose of the book is to provide a “one stop shop” for any kind of scientific writing. It covers manuscripts, grant proposals, job applications, English as a second language, plagiarism, and much more. And when you have this much breadth, it’s not surprising that any one subject is going to suffer a bit in terms of depth.

Reference

Hoffman A. 2009. Scientific Writing and Communication. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-539005-6. OUP link | Amazon link

Pechenik JA. 2010. A Short Guide to Writing About Biology (7^th Edition). Longman. Publisher link | Amazon link

Type fashions

Seth Godin writes:

If you send me a flyer with dated, cheesy or overused type, it's like showing up in a leisure suit for a first date.

He has more good advice, so go read the rest.

Type conveys a lot. Choose wisely.