Critique and makeover: Hot Mediterranean

Today’s poster comes from Francisco Pastor. Click to enlarge!

I like the central part of the poster. It’s very visual and colourful. The two columns are so clear you could probably do without the central dashed line. There are some alignment problems that could be easily fixed. For example:

On both the left and right, there are twelve maps, arranged in three columns by four rows. On the right, the right edge lines up with the bar above them, but on the left, they don’t. Similarly, the rows are squished together on the right, but not on the left, even though the left needs more space, because it has a bar graph immediately below it.

But I can live with that.

It’s the corners that are driving me nuts.

This may be a little hard to see unless you click to enlarge, because the white poster background on the white black background makes it hard to see the edges. While the central material has been given generous white space, every corner is crammed to the edges.

Here’s a closer look at the top, as if it were on a poster board, so you can see the edges better:

I am not sure you could hand this poster without sticking a tack through the institutional logo (not a great loss) or the author credit (that is a loss, because that matters).

I have no idea why the author credit is aligned with the right side of the poster.

And here is the bottom:

Again, notice how the text in the bottom right is positively threatening to overflow its container, and the logo on the left wants to pop out of its box like a stripper out of a birthday cake.

When so much of the poster is set in a clean serif font, it seems strange that the bottom suddenly switches to a script font. And not a very readable one at that. If you want to use two fonts, that’s fine, but both should be used throughout the poster.

Here are some changes to the bottom of the poster to tidy it up. Spot the differences!

1. Shrunk the text in the bottom right corner box by 90%.
2. Moved the text in the bottom left corner down to a more central placement.
3. Removed the dark blue line around the box containing the concluding four bullet points.
4. Shrunk the concluding four bullet points by 90%.
5. Fixed one pixel overlap of “Acknowledgements” box on the two dark blue boxes it touches.
6. Realinged “Acknowledgements and references” text so it was left aligned with the text below it, and closer to the optical middle of the light blue bar it is in.

The moral of the story is: Every part of the poster needs the same attention to detail.