Link roundup for July 2015

This month’s must read is from Bethany Brookshire, a.k.a. the mighty Scicurious, who has been baking cookies for science. She is at the point where she is making posters showing the results of her experiment.

Her article is aimed at people who are still in school, but is worth reading even if you haven’t used glue sticks in a while. For instance, Bethany writes:

What makes a good poster stand out is one having what I call the three C’s.

• Continuity: The poster should present a continuous story of your experiment. ...
• Clarity: When you share your research with others, you want to make sure that what you did is clear. ...
• Consistency: The style of a poster should be consistent to help the poster look clear.

Today’s lesson in why the spacebar was invented: to prevent the University of Florida art education department from embarrassing itself (hat tip to Jeff):

Default QR codes are kind of ugly. But here’s a way to make them more interesting. You can upload a small, high contrast image, and incorporate that into the code at this website. Fer instance, I took this UTRGV institutional logo:

And turned it into this QR code that links to the university home page.

If you squint a bit, you can kind of make out the shape of Texas! I could probably do better if I made a black and white image. Hat tip to Dustin Mayfield Jones.

While everyone is abuzz with the gorgeous images of the Pluto flyby, take a look at how the first television image of Mars was made fifty years ago this week. It’s a story of impatience and a lot of crayons. (Okay, pastels.) It’s a fascinating story of turning data into an image. Hat tip to many, including Sarcastic Rover.

“How big should the text be?” is a persistent, but not readily answered, question of poster designers. But there is a particular kind of poster where text size and visibility has to be rigorously assessed: eye charts. This article is an in-depth look at how eye charts were designed and have changed over time. Hat tip to Mocost.

Here’s one for conference organizers: how to make your meeting accessible to people who are ill or have long term disabilities. Another contribution: make sure chairs are available somewhere for the poster session for people who have trouble standing for long periods.

Album covers become iconic images. Album covers were some of the first things I thought about in design terms. One of my favourite cover designers was Malcolm Garrett, whose name appeared on records by many early 80s UK bands. Songwriter and business woman Little Boots talks about the creation of her latest album cover:

The more you learn about design, the more good descriptions of process become invaluable.

Follow this Twitter thread for some interesting comments on what people look for in a poster.

And I’m going to leave Andrew Farke with the last word this month:

All together now: Posters are often a better presentation medium than talks! For both presenter and viewer! Seriously! #2015SVP

The last 10% of the poster should take more than 10% of your time

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been teaching the #SciFund poster class (compiled material here). It was a learning experience for me as well as the students, because I’ve never used Adobe Illustrator before. I made a poster based on some research I hadn’t presented yet. (The paper is in press; I’ll share the poster here once the paper is out of production and ready to read.)

I had something that I could have hung on a poster board at pretty much any conference in the world around the end of the second week. I felt the poster was maybe 90% of what I wanted it to be. But to get to the point where I thought it was almost 100% of what I wanted it to be, took two to three more weeks.

To be clear, I’m not talking about working continuous eight hours a day on a poster for a couple of weeks, but working on it briefly each day for a couple of weeks. You need to be able to step away from the work and look at it later with fresh eyes.

I spent that time adjusting the leading of the text. I made key numbers bigger. I proofread the text, refined it, and proofed it again (and someone will probably still find errors when I show it). I moving around a logo. I tried a different logo, realized it didn’t work, and switched it back to the first one. I tweaked the colours. I added lines, made them thinner, thicker, adjusted the line colours, then made them thinner again.

Those tiny little adjustments may not be something that an average viewer can easily identify when they read your poster, but the difference in the overall impression it leaves on a viewer is huge.

You have to leave yourself time to make all those tiny little adjustments. When you first start making a poster, improvements come fast, and the zones of “I could never hang that up” and “I could show it, but I wouldn’t be proud of it” are narrow.

The range of what is a passable poster is large. And somewhere in that big gray zone of “I like this and nobody would give me grief about it” is where you hit the point of diminishing returns. Sure, the poster is getting better, but not as much as when you started blocking it out.

To get to something that truly stands out, you have to keep working past that point of diminishing returns. You have to be willing to keep adjusting, coming back the next day, and adjusting again. The final improvements will come in at a crawl, not a sprint.

Critique and makeover: Fine lace

Melissa WilsonSayres found this poster at this year’s Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference:

Yes, that’s a bra in the background. The authors made their poster into a boob joke.

The reaction to this on Twitter was not positive. Comments ranged from “shocked” to “mind boggling” to “poor choices all around” to “what where they thinking” to “speechless” to “great way to get people to miss the point of your poster.”

Okay. There is much to discuss here, and I’m not sure I’ll get to it all. There are a lot of things to talk about, I know, with everyday sexism and gender roles and appropriate behaviour in a professional setting and more.

I’m not one to talk about this. I am not about to cast the first stone on using knickers in design. I did, after all, write an entire post about lessons from lingerie. But this poster... that wasn’t what I meant.

Putting aside all that, this is a poorly designed poster, both conceptually and graphically. Let’s go back to a basic principle:

The design of a conference poster should be in the service of what the audience wants to know. Here, the design is in the service of a joke. And the joke doesn’t make any point about the scientific content.

For instance, Andrea Kirkwood noted:

The background is overemphasized to the detriment of the data.

Bad at Being Human had the most memorable critique:

The combination of the title style and the background comes across as the textual form of motorboarding.

I completely agree with this. It’s not just that there’s a bra as a background image, but the authors squeeze the title down into the cleavage to emphasize the breasts.

It’s not just the bra that’s the problem, either. There is a lot of room to improve in almost every aspect of the poster. Roberto Marquez added:

Plus 3D plots (why does anyone even consider...?)

The title is well below eye level, and will be blocked by anyone standing in front of the poster.

The typefaces seem to be chosen to be “feminine,” but they are hard to read. I cannot make out the text of the introduction in the photo, for example, even at the highest magnification. The swishy text might have made for a good heading, but is a horrible choice for the majority of the text.

Here’s what I would have done.

When I do poster makeover, I try to not to destroy the spirit of what the authors wanted. The title indicates that wanted something a little sexy. I am not opposed to making something sexy. Appealing to our sexual side can be a powerful way to communicate, if you can get past the inherent craziness and irrationality that comes along with sex appeal. See the “four organs of communication” in some of Randy Olson’s writing (summarized here).

In search of sexy, the authors went with the bra image. The problem is that the imagery they used is too literal and in your face. It violate the Sommese rule and treats the audience like morons.

I’ve talked before about the power of pastiche: imitating something that is a proven and recognizable template. You want to evoke lacy bras? Pick a well known and recognizable brand that one associates with lacy underthings.

I would go look at a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. (Purely for research!)

I’d look at the type used in the Victoria’s Secret logo and in the main pages. Bell MT is close to their main logo. I also notice that they use a mix of small caps and italics in their display text. Victoria’s Secret sometimes use a grotesque sans serif that I can’t identify. I tried a Franklin Gothic as a substitute.

I’d take a few representative pages from the catalogue to figure out what the colour palette might be. It would probably be pinks, pastel blue, creamy or pearly off-whites.

My version of this poster might be more like this (click to enlarge):

The key element is the lace of the title. The lace is now a very light, subtle pattern in the background. I took a large image of lace, and used the corrections in Microsoft Publisher to adjust the lightness and recolour it. To reinforce the lace theme, I kept something the authors had in their original poster: a little bow, which I put at the bottom instead of the side.

This is just my first draft, and certainly isn’t the only or best way to do it. The makeover shows that colour, type, and patterns alone can evoke a little bit of the sexiness implied by the title.

Make this your working title for every poster

When you’re laying out your poster, instead of typing in the title you put in your abstract, put this:

“No one has to read this crap.”

Frame grab from this interview with Ed Yong. Ed has this posted above his desk as advice for freelancers, but the advice is equally appropriate for poster makers.

Nobody owes your their time at a conference. Nobody has to stop at your poster. Nobody has to talk to you.

Let that harsh realization guide your editing and design to make something that another person, who is not you, who is not invested in the project, wants to read.

Update, 1 October 2015: This quote apparently originated with Tim Radford. (Radford’s rule #6.)

Critique: Galaxy quest

This week’s poster comes from Chelsea Sharon, and is shown with her kind permission. Click to enlarge!

Chelsea writes:

I feel like hardly anyone ever has useful design critiques for me, and I’ve certainly settled into a specific template.

I would try to calm down some of the type in the title and headings by removing outlines and underline. The title is particularly busy, with the title and the authors’ names and the authors’ institutions each getting a different combination of colour and outline: red with white outline, white with blue outline, blue with white outline. The outline of the authors’ names is making those two lines come perilously close together, touching in several places:

While the photo is reasonably subdued, it contributes to the overall feel of clutter. 

I’m not a fan of author photos on posters, but this one could be incorporated more smoothly. The picture breaks the symmetry of the title, and again contributes to the crowded feel. If you’re going to have a non-symmetrical layout, own it, by not centering the text. My revision might look something like this:

(You’ll have to image the background image of the radio telescope array.)

One other little point in the title bar is that Fabian
Walter’s name gets broken across two lines (as I have imitated in this paragraph). Where to put line breaks in text can be a tricky business, but it’s probably best not to break up an author’s first and last names if possible.

Travelling down to the main body of the poster, the underline on the headings could be removed.

The bullets are not bringing anything to the table. Bullets are effective for calling out short lists in larger blocks of text. Here, they fall victim to the Syndrome syndrome:

The amount of text is intimidating, and makes me wonder if some cutthroat editing might be in order.

Having most of the the main text all in the center of the poster helps provide a thread for the reader to follow through. Having the figures on the sides of that central column meas the reader has to weave back and forth between the text and the figures, but it isn’t too confusing. Maybe there could be few signals to link the text and the figure: some emphasis with bolding, and perhaps even a hint of colour?

Finally, those big heavy blue lines separating each block? Let’s see what happens if we remove those:

The poster seems to hold up fine without them.

Related posts

Mug shot

External links

Run ragged