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