Critique and makeover: Heart emergencies

 Today’s contribution is from Alexandra Millhuff. Click to enlarge!

This poster combines a few elements of the billboard style with a more common three column layout. It’s certainly better than many of its competitors, with more graphics and fewer words. But I think there is room to push it even further in readability and focusing attention.

First, I wanted to clear up the title bar. 

The logo on the left was causing two problems. First, it drew attention away from the title, because it was in the critical top left corner, where experienced readers of English naturally look first. It grabs even more attention because of the high contrast white box and red letters.

The other problem was that although the title and authors are aligned to the centre of their text box, they aren’t centrally aligned with the page overall. It’s been pushed to the right to make space for the logo on the left. This destroys the symmetry that you want in centre aligned text.

I moved the title and authors to the right. I found an all white version of the university logo that got rid of the box and matched the rest of the title bar. The logo is a little smaller, which allowed me to put all of the author info on one line. This creates a little more white space, which helps make the title the focus of the title bar.

Next, I cleaned up the columns. 

I got rid of bullets because they were adding visual clutter. Unless your text is an actual list in a longer section of text, you are better off without bullets. 

There were two alignment issues. Some of the text boxes in the columns on the left and right didn’t align. Here is a close up of the left column, with a vertical line drawn down the page. Notice how the bullets are just to the right of the line in the top text box, sit on the line in the middle box, and are to the left of the line in the bottom box.

Also, the text didn’t line up with the boxes containing the headings. This last point is one that is a good example of how PowerPoint works against you if you’re not careful. 

When you create a text box in PowerPoint, it adds white space around the text by default. This doesn’t matter if you only have text lining up with text. But if you want text to line up next to anything else, the text will be misaligned with other objects. Click to enlarge!

Here is how you fix that problem in PowerPoint. You have to manually change the margins to zero. Under “Shape format,” expand the sidebar. Fine the “Text options” tab and set the margins to zero.

The result of those changes:

Next, I moved the main graphic from the middle to the right. This is one of those decisions that I think some people might disagree with. They might argue that these are results, and so the logical place to put them is after the “Study design” section in the left-hand column.

It is true that the graphic show results, but in practice on this poster, it is acting more as a summary for the project. I say this because it has a big sentence at the top – set in even large point size than the title! And there is no “Results” heading above the graphic.

The problem with a placing a big summary graphic in the middle is that it breaks the reading flow. By moving it to the left, it emphasizes that this is the big take-home message. The title and this graphic clearly get signalled as the most important things on the poster.

Could this graphic stay in the centre? Absolutely. I would put a “Results” heading above it, and probably adjust it so that there is a little more flow in reading, rather than this image taking as much focus as it is.

Next, , I did some more text editing and repositioning. I aligned the take-home sentence above the infographic with the title. I edited the text throughout to make it shorter, and adjusted the position of the text boxes accordingly. These edits included the the message above the graphic, but that will change again... 

I continued to look for places to make cuts.

I made another possibly controversial decision: I got rid of the references. The reason for cutting it out was that the references weren’t referenced. That is, there was no place in the main text they were mentioned. They were functioning more like a “For further reading” suggestion than citations.

I noted that in the graphic, every factor shown had a p value underneath it. And they were all exactly the same p value! Rather than saying the same p value seven times, I cut those and noted the p values in a sentence underneath the graphic.

Lastly, I made some more adjustments to the central graphic. I tried to make the circles more evenly spaced.

Also, I reworded the top take home message. I realized “older women” was inaccurate, because there were two separate risk factors. I had tried to condense too much.

I ran this last version past Alexandra to confirm that my various edits to the text hadn't changed the meaning from what she intended.

Here’s the changes in a movie:

Thanks to Alexandra for being willing to share her poster!