Critique: C’est difficile

Contributor Abigail Kelly is the maker of today’s poster. She bemoans that she never gets feedback on them. Well... we aim to please here on the Better Posters blog. Click to enlarge!

I hate to say it, but Abigail’s poster shows the lack of feedback. There are many problems that I have featured on the “Key posts” on the blog’s sidebar.

• Uneven columns, contributing to unclear reading order. (Do I go across in rows, or down?)
• Very narrow margins, and noticeable uneven ones, too.
• Boxes around everything.
• A barrage of bullet points. The bullets are disproportionately large, and not aligned with the first line of text, as is standard.
• Uneven logos bookending the title.
• The tables are in a data prison.
• Vague and generic title.

My first thought was that the best approach to this poster was to blow it up, take it as a lesson learned, and start over.

But my second thought was, “That’s not in the spirit of the blog.” The spirit of this blog is that you can always find ways to make an existing poster better.

I went back to my usual first step when I try to improve a poster: take out the trash.

First, I cleaned up the top. I ditched the logos to create space to rearrange the title and author credit. I also shrunk the main image in the upper left, which needed more white space around it. I probably could have shrunk that diagram down even more.

Then, I got rid of the boxes, and the vertical lines in all the tables.

The hardest bit was figuring out what to do with the icons in the methods. They were too big, and didn’t line up with the text, or each other. I didn’t want to get rid of them entirely, because they added some much needed colour to the poster. I decided to shrink them way down, and lined up each with the top line of the paragraph they were in.

Finally, after removing a lot, I added one thing to the poster.

Shrinking the method icons had helped reveal the structure of the poster. The “Methods” and “Results” now have a clear margin between them. But I wanted another visual cue to indicate the different sections of the poster. I also wanted to add in a little more colour.

Using an eyedropper tool, I picked up some red from the main figure in the top right, so the colour was consistent with what was already on the poster. Then, I used an artistic brush tool to paint a line above each main heading. That the intensity drops off as the stroke moves right gives the line a bit of an organic feel, so that it isn’t a rigid rule.

This poster still has many issues. There’s still too much text, and the irregular column structure is problem. But with these changes, the poster is starting to look organized.

Here’s an animation so you can see the changes a bit better.

Down the road, it might be a good exercise for Abigail to revisit this poster. Start with the same material, and quickly knock out a new version. I did this to one of mine here.