Critique: Glowing dust

Friend of the blog Natalia Asari has already shared a poster with us. But It’s been a while, so you might ask, what else has Natalia been up to? Click to enlarge! 

Natalia wrote:

This poster was for a conference which switched from being in-person to completely online. I did it in landscape mode, which is better for computer screens. In Brazil and Europe the room for posters is usually for a A0 poster in portrait format, so this is probably what it would have been were the conference held in person in an alternate timeline with no pandemic in 2020.

The colour scheme of the poster is inspired in the colour maps I used in my plots. I used Pages because, well, I am familiar with it. I tried Inkscape once, but I did not allow enough time to get it working properly and gave up. The problem with posters is that I usually make one once in a blue moon (say, once every two years), while I give talks much more often. So I have not honed my posters skills a whole lot.

In that conference, flash talks for posters should be at most 2:30 minutes, and had to be pre-recorded. Here is mine:

https://youtu.be/OsJVbKDWGu4

It took me a couple of tries to get it short. It is much more difficult than in person, but I think this is the same lesson I have learned teaching remote classes this year and organising remote meetings and supervision. 

This is a perfectly respectable poster. I would try to make the text blocks in the “less than the sum of its parts” section equally wide. Currently, the line length on the left is noticeably longer than the line length on the right.

Thanks to Natalia for sharing her online poster design and experience!

Related posts

Critique: Stellar populations 

External links

Natalia Vale Asari home page 

Critique: Bang your head

We have two posters today from contributor Nicole Ackermans! This first poster is from a Mount Sinai Annual Neuroscience Retreat. Click to enlarge!

Excellent concision in the text. This poster is about 300 words long.

This poster impresses with the simplicity of the text, which could carry over into its visuals. The background are the glowing effect on the title are making the poster look complicated when it isn’t.

The picture of the muskoxen provides an entry point for a viewer. I wish it was a bit bigger and clearer. The dark fur against the dark background reduces its impact. A white background, like the other graphs, might have helped. Here’s a quick mock-up.

Personally, I would have put all the headings in a row, rather than sometimes above, sometimes below the pictures. Consistency is helpful. Having the pictures above the text puts the graphics closer to eye level.

One thing you cannot see in the image above, though, is the very useful visual aid that went with the poster.

Skulls are cool.

Nicole’s second poster is from the Experimental Biology conference.

This poster is even shorter and sweeter than the first: only about 200 words! Much better contrast across the board, so it looks as crisp as it reads.

The only thing I question is the sideways section headings. I have come around to the point that generally you don’t want people to have to read sideways or tilt their heads if you can help it. But since each is only one word, and those words are the super familar “IMRaD” headings, it’s fine. 

Nicole assures me that posters were two to a board. She wasn’t leaving all that poster space unused!

I thank Nicole for letting me show her posters!

Critique: Got water?

Today’s contributer is Antonia Hadjimichael. She sent a pair, presented in no particular order. They were both presented at the American Geophysical Union in the same year. You can click the enlarge the first...

...Or the second!

 Antonia wrote:

I don’t get to do posters often and it was an exciting challenge!

For someone who doesn’t do posters often, she certainly rose to the challenge! What strikes me about both is that these show better than average design choices. It’s clear from the colours, and the integration of text and graphics.

Antonia did have a couple of constraints in creating these. The project’s sponsor wanted the logo on the top left and mandated the blue-green-blue banner. 

I was surprised by the word count. The first poster is about 800 words, and the second is about 700. That’s probably around average for this conference (Faulkes 2023), but because the main text is set quite small, I would have guessed the word count to be well over a thousand. I would look for places on both to reclaim space and increase text size. 

I do appreciate the effort to make the first poster more skimmable by bolding for emphasis.

Let’s continue with top poster for a minute. Antonia has tried a couple of other things to increase the readability.

 

The poster do not use the common “Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion” format, which is good. I recently wrote about the “complete assertion headings” format, and this comes very close to that style. “Regional-scale model underrepresents sub-basin variability” is a clear statement. “Modeling across scales,” though, is a fragment, and not as helpful.

Another way the poster tries to make itself more readable is by including a “Main findings” section. Excellent idea! But the “Main findings” section is too subdued visually.  

Look at the colour, weight, and case of “Main findings”: low contrast, thin stroke, sentence case.

Look at the colour, weight, and case of the other headings: high contrast, bold, and ALL CAPS.

The callout box for the “Main findings” helps, but it’s not enough. The low visibility heading and low value right corner makes this easy to overlook.

Because the section headings come close to summarizing the poster, it might be worth removing the “Main findings” section and hitting those three points in the section headings. The last section heading is the first main finding, so the task is already one third done.

Let’s go on to the second poster.

 

Like the first poster, this one has a lot of visual complexity.

The poster tries to provide signposts about the order that it is meant to be read in. It works! It works with maybe one exception. 

The placement of “This study addresses two questions” suggests it’s the second section of the poster.

But the numbered circular arrow leads to a graph, which overlaps with the callout, “This study addresses two questions.” The overlap signals that it’s part of the callout, read before you start at the number 1 end of the arrow. But being at the end of the arrow suggests the graph is to be read last.

The lower left corner is another place that has a lot going on. Methods are always one of those things that people are reluctant to cut. I appreciate the effort to convey the methodology visually, but I am not sure how much value the icons and detailed descriptions are bringing. Maybe “Use 20,000 core hours
to perform 600,000 model executions” is important, but as someone not in this space, it seems a little superfluous.

Likewise, I am not sure the SQL icon brings any more clarity than “SQL” written in the heading above it. Same goes for some of the other icons. I would try just having the headings for points 3 and 4, to clear up some space.

Thanks to Antonia for sharing her work!

Related posts

Making statements with section headings on your conference poster

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2023. The “wall of text” visual structure of academic conference posters. Frontiers in Communication 8: 1063345. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1063345