Critique: RNA capping

Today’s contribution comes from Melvin Noé González. It was presented at an RNA meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Click to enlarge!

He writes:

Through the years I experimented with various templates for poster presentation, and I’m proud to say I’m really happy with how this one turned out. As you will find, I used a piece of advice you mentioned in one of your posts regarding a short summary section — and people loved it! I was approached by several people just because they thought the layout was cool, even though I wasn’t related to their research.

I’m always glad to have feedback that advice works!

The title bar works well, by presenting everything cleanly. The logo is sensibly over to one side, and blends into the background. The authors names are prominent, with institution and contact information legible, but low key.

This poster is well organized, which helps walk you though what is maybe a little too much material. The numbers by each heading ensure you don’t get lost.

Some of the layout would benefit from a little more tweaking. The spacing between the boxes is inconsistent. The margin above the “Graphical summary” are wider than the margins between the “Background” boxes and the data boxes on the right.

There’s one place where this poster goes off the rails. Fortunately, it’s down in the fine print section, in the acknowledgements and references. While I appreciate how beautiful that three-dimensional molecular structure is, and how much it adds visually to the poster, it does terrible things to the text around it.

It’s tearing that text apart.

When we read, we expect related text to be close together. When I look at the “Acknowledgements,” I see two blocks of text that I want to read separately.

But how you are supposed to read the acknowledgements is far more complicated. What I thought was the first sentence of the first text block is the third fragment of the entire acknowledgements section.

Just when I think I have gotten used to the lines broken into two pieces, the second to last line gets split into three pieces.

The same thing happens in the references, with a DOI number danging far from the “doi:” text identifying it.

Wrapping text around an object can look graceful and elegant. But you cannot just “set and forget” a setting in your layout software. You have to be willing to go in and adjust things by hand to avoid these kinds of problems.