The delight is in the details

Being Canadian, of course I played and watched hockey, although in my case, it was extremely casual and not something I actively followed. But I’ve been watching the creation of the PWHL with interest. The league’s first season did something unusual: none of the teams had names. They were just called by the name of their city or state.

But a few weeks ago, we finally got team names! Here’s a look at the six team logos:

The graphic designers did a bang-up job, I think. And because this is the poster blog, there is a lesson I would like poster makers to think about.

Almost every team sport has numbers on the back of their shirts, tops, jerseys, guernseys, whatever they happen to be called in that particular sport. The PWHL jerseys have them too:

But I have never seen any other league do what the PWHL has done with their jerseys. Every number has a series of small icons running through them. This is the Toronto Sceptres’ jersey:

From a distance, it might look like a raindrop, but it’s an orb (I’ve seen it called the “orb of unity”) that has been pulled from the team logo. You can see the orb better in this close-up of the top of the team logo:

The player numbers for the Boston Fleet get waves, Montréal Victoire players get fleur-de-lis, and so on.

I love this. I love details that reward anyone who takes a slightly closer than usual look. Designers have a phrase for this: “surprise and delight.” If you search “design surprise delight,” you can find many essays about it importance.

Here’s an example of one such detail that appeared in the blog before: a detail hidden in a QR code. QR codes are a great place to put such details, because the code is deliberately quite robust: it can degrade quite a bit and still work.

Other places that you could put in some sort of detail?

Many people use section headings on their poster that follow the journal “IMRAD” format. The headings are often simple boxes of solid colour with one word in them. There is almost always some space for a little detail or two.

While I dislike bullets on posters in general, if you do have cause to use one, you could try some small icon (like the orb above!) instead of a true bullet.

I think there might also be some possibilities to try to take elements of a university logo and put them somewhere else in the poster besides the title bar.

But a skeptical reader might ask: “What’s in it for me?”

How does this help you, a conference presenter? Isn’t a detail, by definition, something that will get overlooked by most people? How will it help you get one more visitor at your poster?

The honest answer is: it might not help you get one more visitor at your poster. This isn’t a technique to get more people. It’s a technique to give those who do stop at your poster a an extra little reward, and one hopes, a better and more memorable experience.

Think of it this way: people at a research conference are inundated with information. They are going to be living in their heads for a few days during the meeting. There may not be all that many opportunities for them to smile at a little detail they spot on a poster. You’re giving your viewer a chance to have an emotion, and emotion is core to social connections. And social connections are the basis for professional connections.

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