Critique: Lumbar party

I want to thank Sasha Aspinall for sharing this award winning poster. Click to enlarge!

Sasha wrote (lightly edited):

I presented this poster at a back and neck pain conference in Quebec City. I’m really proud of it, and drew a lot of inspiration from your blog. I was surprised that it won best student poster, and I attribute a lot of that to the design.

I put a lot of work into the design, in particular trying to make it visually interesting since its a topic that doesn’t really lend itself easily to engaging visuals. 

I found the graphic on the top right corner on a stock image site, Because it was a vector graphic I was able to change the colours in it fairly easily. I then built the rest of the poster around that to play on the comic book style of the graphic.

Unfortunately, the first time I had it printed the printers got the margins all wrong. On the second print they got the margins correct but somehow small light green rectangles appeared within the green heading boxes, and I didn’t have time to get it reprinted a third time. I attached a pic of what it looked like once printed. 😊

Lots of good design choices here. The poster:

• Says the main conclusion in the title.
• Keeps lots of white space.
• Could be read in a few minutes.
• Directly labelled graphs. 
• Has a clearly signposted summary for someone who wants the bottom line.

I have just few things that I might have tried.

The typeface for the bulk of the text is Eras Light. This font, designed in 1976, is well known and well used. I worry that the Light weight fades out a little at a distance. 

There is a Book weight for Eras that might have been worth trying. 

 

The yellow emulates the style of classic comics. It works great in the title bar and “Final word”. But  the yellow in Figure 2 is a little too light. I might have tried a different colour that was a little higher contrast.

And because I’m a comics fan and a little picky, the word balloon at top might be a bit more effective if the pointer was aimed more at the speaker’s face than his elbow. Reminder: You can buy professionally made word balloons that are used by actual comics creators! (Links below.)

Always pleased to show the work from another satisfied customer!

External links

Comicraft word balloons

Blambot word balloons  

Grids and gestures and posters

I watched this video about comics.

I wasn’t aware of Nick Sousanis before. In his introductory remarks, he briefly describes a teaching exercise he uses called “Grids and gestures.” In a technical paper, Sousanis (2015) wrote: 

In comics, not only are we concerned with what goes on in each frame or panel, but we also need to attend to the size and shape of individual panels, their orientation, and their placement within the overall composition and relationship to other elements of the page(.)

It struck me that this is something that is so missing from thinking about conference posters, even in my own writing.

Posters, like comics, are often made with distinct panels, but makers are mostly concerned about what goes into the panels, rather than how the shape, size, and placement of the panels themselves could show information.

Here’s an example: an old Little Nemo in Slumberland page. Think about what those ever lengthening panels signify,

Or this famous page from The Amazing Spider-Man #33. 

Those four panels could be all the same size. But making that last panel so big shows that is a pivotal moment.

Poster makers can practice those layout skills using Sousanis’s grids and gestures exercise. It goes like this.

1. Take a page of paper and something to write with. The page is going to show one day. It could be today, yesterday, a memorable day, any day you want.
2. Divide the page into panels that represent parts of that day. 
3. In each panel, put something that represents the feeling of that part of the day. 

Here is just one example Sousanis got from one of his students. This shows this isn’t an exercise in drawing or technical draftsmanship.

 I think you can make some guesses about how someone’s day went.

To adapt this to a conference poster, we might ask, “What does the shape of this project to this point look like?”

Was there a long boring grind? Was there a big “A-ha!” moment? How would that look on a page like above? Can you capture some of that in the final poster?

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Reference

Sousanis Nick. 2015. Grids and gestures: A comics making exercise. SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education 2(1): 8. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/vol2/iss1/8

External links

Grids and gestures