Critique: Crayfish cell culture

“Here’s one we did earlier,” as they say on the cooking shows. This was a poster I did in 2018 for the International Crustacean Congress in Washington, DC, and the paper is now out as a preprint. Click to enlarge!

I had seen lots of posters that used white text on black effectively. I decided this was my turn to try it. The background is not a “pure” black, however. It’s more a very dark brown. I used the eyedropper tool to pick a dark colour from the central picture of the crayfish. Likewise, the large text is not pure white, but a slightly off-white picked up from some of the gravel. The consistence of colour helps tie the poster together.

The amount of text on the poster is higher than I would like. But because the point of this poster is to describe a method, it’s either a set of instructions written in sentences, or a flowchart. I took the coward’s way out and wrote it out.

The combination of a lot of text with the square format necessitated some tough choices in typography. I either needed a small point size or a narrow width font, and I chose the latter (Noto Sans Condensed Light). I think the white text on the dark background “pops” enough to make the ext readable.

The typeface for the title and headings is Bernhard Modern, which has been the logo for the Marmorkrebs.org website for many years. Since Marmorkrebs is the species featured on the poster, might as well have consistency.

You might wonder why there is a figure in the right column above the “Results” heading. The figure is a result, so shouldn’t it be under the heading? Logically, yes. Visually, I much preferred aligning the pictures. Here’s an earlier draft with the more traditional heading placement (and a more traditional “dark on light” colour scheme.

The final version looked more solid, because the tops of the pictures now align and the “Cell culture method” and “Results” headings align. The introduction, central picture, and left picture create a section running across the poster horizontally that doesn’t disrupt the column flow.

Having more than a year since I’ve worked on this poster, there are a few things I might do differently now.

The title is too ambiguous. One of the lessons I have recently learned about headlines is that they should always make sense out of context. “A new method for cell culture from a cloning crayfish” would be longer, but would stand alone more effectively.

In retrospect, I probably should have made the text ragged right instead of fully justified. And I’m sure that if I kept editing, I could have fit the text in using a regular weight font instead of light.

Reference

DeLeon H III, Garcia J Jr., Silva DC, Quintanilla O, Faulkes Z, Thomas JM III. Culturing embryonic cells from the parthenogenetic clonal marble crayfish Marmorkrebs Procambarus virginalis Lyko, 2017 (Decapoda: Astacidea: Cambaridae). Journal of Crustacean Biology: in press. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcbiol/ruz063