Link roundup for April 2014

I’ve blogged about digital posters from time to time, but I have yet to see or hear them done well. Das Terminal is apparently trying to position itself for the inevitable future of posters on screens instead of paper (hat tip to Peter Casserly). Here’s some of their screens:

I’m not sure of the industrial location they chose to photograph their product places it in the friendliest, or gives the impression of something contemporary or forward-looking.

This is a very interesting article about how your colour choices affect how people interpret your data.

When colors are paired with the concepts that evoke them, we call these “semantically resonant color choices.” ...(S)emantically resonant colors can enable you to take advantage of familiar existing relationships, thus requiring you to use less conscious thought and speeding recall. Non-resonant colors, on the other hand, can cause semantic interference: the colors and concepts interfere with each other(.)

Here’s an example:

Hat tip to Nancy Duarte and Harvard Business Review.

Poster Session alerts PowerPoint users to some weirdness in how PowerPoint renders purples.

The reason is that PowerPoint works in the RGB color space, and the interpretation of RGB into the CMYK colors that a printer uses is not always what it should be.

A nominee for “Best poster title of the year”:

Heh. Jon Tennant says, “Just decided this is going to be the layout for every future poster presentation I give”:

Empathy with the user! That’s the heart of Justin Kiggin’s great answer to, “Why do scientist still read PDFs of papers instead of web versions?” Because publishers keep doing this to their HTML versions:

It’s the logo problem all over again. Stop giving us irrelevant stuff.

Here’s a nice set of answers on Quora over how professionals choose different typefaces. Here’s an excerpt from the top rated answer:

“How do I choose the right font” is such a simple question yet there are so many ways to answer it. ... As a designer, you are (or should be) always paying attention to design in your environment and media. If you notice a cool typeface in something, like a movie poster or a billboard, see if you can track it down later using Google searches or WhatTheFont, so you can add it to your arsenal for future use.

Also includes a link out to bad type choices.

For some weird, strange reason, academics seem to love Comics Sans. I don’t think it’s the right choice for most academic purposes, but, if you insist on that style of typeface, why not at least get cleaned up version of it? Presenting Comic Neue, a much improved version of the most maligned typeface. (I still don’t like the serif on the capital C.) Hat tip to Mary Canady.

But an even better choice? Use typefaces created by professional comic letterers!