The Better Posters blog is now twelve years old! And with the Better Posters book coming out next month, I think I can safely say that this coming year will be big and bright for this blog!
Thank you for your attention!
Photo by Pewari on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
A new paper looks to reignite debate on where to start the Y axis on bar graphs. Excerpt:
(W)e investigate the practice of truncating the
y-axis of bar graphs to start at a non-zero value. While this has been
called one of “the worst of crimes in data visualization” by The Economist,
it is surprisingly common in not just news and social media, but also
in scientific conferences and publications. This might be because the
injunction to “not truncate the axis!” may be seen as more dogmatic than
data-driven.
Hat tip to Roger Giner-Sorolla.
• • • • •
You’re not an artist, so why not work with someone who is? Virginia Gewin at Nature looks at how to create a good scientist / artist collaboration. The takeaways?
Do your homework.
Define “success” and expectations.
Make research multi-sensory.
Create a two-way experience.
Take risks.
Add emotion to science.
Of course, graphic design is not art, but there may be some ideas here to use.
• • • • •
How the New York Times visualizes the first half a million deaths in the United States from COVID-19. They showed every dead person in their plot. Every one.
A few weeks ago, I suggested you look at your design and ask, “What’s it for?”
This is Australian footballer Krstel Petrevski modelling a jumper she designed for the Melbourne Demons featuring indigenous art. The league has an indigenous round to celebrate Australian and Torres Strait Islander indigenous culture.
Here’s a close-up:
Krstel talks about the design in the YouTube video below. Her talk is a great lesson in, “What’s it for?” Everything you see in that design has meaning. The exact number of circles down the sides, the hand prints, everything.
(And by the way, can you imagine a professional sports league in North American having a week where every team in the league played in uniforms designed by Native American artists? I can’t. Alas.)
Last week, I gave a presentation online to the University of New Hampshire. They recorded it, and have generously made the recording not only available to their campus community, but to everyone.
You can find the workshop here. As of now, I don’t know if there is a way to embed the video.
Thanks to the four rugged individuals who agreed to let me review their posters. I gave each poster a nickname:
The kitchen drawer poster
The “Too much coffee” poster
The tombstone poster
The “Just a trim” poster
The video is extra convenient, because you can listen to it at one and a half or even double speed, pause, or rewind it – unlike me!
This is a great question to stop and ask yourself occasionally when designing something. It helps ensure that whatever you’re doing is deliberate (or intentional, as Godin puts it).
Those logos around the title? What are they for?
That abstract on the poster? What are they for?
Those acknowledgements at the end? What are they for?
If you can’t answer that, why is it on the poster?
Scott Berkun has another book that I want to read, How Design Makes the World, but haven’t yet. However, he just shared a blog post about how to look at designed things more critically. And, like Godin, Berkun has questions. Here are a few questions that got my attention and that I think are relevant for posters.
Is it clear what it does? Is easy to learn? Does it work reliably?
What message is its style sending to you?
Who is included or excluded from participating in using it?
What systems is this design a part of? Are those systems working well?
For years, I’ve used covers of Cosmopolitan magazine to illustrate a point.
Cosmoalways had a sex story, and it was always featured in the upper left corner of the cover. That’s where people who read in English look first. Sex sells, so of course that’s where you want to put a sexy headline.
But I can’t use Cosmo as my example any more. I went looking for more recent examples and found the newest cover:
Acne?!
A search through the magazine’s Twitter feed for the last year shows this is no aberration. The sexy headlines seem to have been mostly banished from the cover for a while.
Clearly Cosmo is under the control of a new editorial staff or new graphic design staff. Can’t tell which. Or maybe it’s a reflection of more of its readers being online, so the “gotta compete for attention on the supermarket check-out rack” need is less pressing.
If that’s so, that’s worth noting. Graphic design changes with time. Being viewed on the supermarket checkout is different than being seen on a screen.
As conferences moved online in the last year, similar forces are at work today for conference posters. Many design principles are the same, but the design demands of choosing which physical piece of paper on a board in a hallway to view are not the same as navigating menus on screen.
Now I have to come up with a new, more au courant metaphor to describe the importance of that upper left part of the page.
I am a first time author, and everything I have heard from other people who have written books in the last couple of years is that pre-orders help a book tremendously. There has never been a better time to be one of the first to get this long awaited and long needed book.
Academic conference posters are often ugly, with tiny text, confusing layouts, and dubious colour schemes. Better Posters is about making posters informative and beautiful.
“Great blog with constantly updated resources.” - The Scientist magazine
“The ‘Go To’ place to send students when they start preparing posters for their first scientific meetings” – Bora Zivcovik
“I wish there were more blogs on this subject(.) Mostly because most scientific poster presentations are absolutely ghastly. Not just bad, or unseemly; ghastly.” – RobertSOakes
“I want to passive-aggressively run around poster sessions putting up Post-it notes with his url on every poster.” – Dominque
“Better Posters blog is A - MAZE-ING” – A. Roehrich
“I find the Better Posters site comforting. I can’t possibly be as bad as some of them there.” – Anne Jefferson
“@DoctorZen's Better Posters Blog is blowing my mind. Love it! #useful” – Elizabeth Sargent
“It’s @DoctorZen’s better poster blog’s fault as to why my poster looks classy & timeless.” – Ricardo Vilain
“Was man alles beachten muss, um ein gutes Poster abzuliefern, an dem die Kollegen auch stehen bleiben, kann man im Blog Better Posters lernen(.)” – Alles was lebt
“recommending reading @doctorzen Better Posters Blog to sci presenters. And anyone who will listen.” – @andrea1
“Should be compulsory reading for academics.” – @sthcrft
“Better Posters blog dispenses solid (much-needed) advice; recognises synergy between aesthetics+info” – Jason Priem
“I’m loving @DoctorZen’s http://betterposters.blogspot.com/ & happy to find I’ve been following the rules! Will show this to ALL students.” – @_modscientist_
“Just put up my poster, it looks fab thanks to @DoctorZen!” – @_modscientist_
“Make sure you read http://betterposters.blogspot.com” – @boris_gorelik
“Conference season is descending upon us, and @DoctorZen's blog will save scientists a lot of grief” – Andrea Wishart
“It's super useful especially to those of us who have a hard time figuring out what is awesome and what is eye-bleedingly terrible.” – Miriam Goldstein