Critique: Artseed

Today’s poster is from contributor Chetan Keshav. Click to enlarge!

Chetan wrote, “ It’s not as scientific as most of the posters featured on your blog though.” That is a good thing! One of my biggest wishes for this blog is that I would get a lot more posters from the humanities and other disciplines. I will take all conference posters from any discipline! Love all, serve all.

This poster does something that everyone is familiar with: it compares the old and the new, side by side. It’s a classic “Before” and “After.” But it’s a little hard to tell that at a glance.

Normally, when you see a “Before” and “After” comparison, it’s pictures of the same person. Like these people who got new haircuts:

You don’t need to label these as “Before” and “After,” because it’s obviously the same person. The face, and in this case the clothes, are identical.

With a website makeover, there is no such continuity. Everything changed. It would be helpful to indicate that these two different looking images are, in fact, the same site at different times.

To do this, the poster could embrace its four column format more strongly. As it happens, everything on the whole left half is “Before” and everything on the whole right half is “After.” I would try dividing it exactly down the middle, and put big “Before” and “After” headings at top that span half the poster. Then, I would divide the poster into four equal columns, instead of the kinda sorta even-ish four columns it has now.

If the design went that route, the title bar might need a little reworking to give space to the “Before” and “After” headings that would go up at the top.

I would keep almost everything else almost the same. I like the coloured headings, which are a nice way to break up grayness simply and quickly. And the icons and typography in the main text boxes are very good and don’t need changing.