The uphill battle for QR codes

QR codes offer the potential to enhance a poster in all sorts of cool ways. But there are issues to think about before you use them.

Audience side

1. Why do I care what’s on the other side? What is the carrot for someone to take the picture with their smartphone and download? Most of the carrots I’ve seen offered by QR codes are on par with those “3 secrets of a flat stomach” ads that litter websites. 
2. QR codes are not self-explanatory. You have to explicitly explain to someone what it is and how to do it the first time. When people first got email long ago, they included explicit instructions about how to format the addresses. It took a few years for understanding of email to become common knowledge. QR codes are at that very early stage of people’s understanding of what they are.
3. You need a smartphone. Heck, I don’t have one.
4. You have to have a specific app on your smartphone.

Presenter side

1. QR codes require planning. You have to have something to link to. Given that many people do things at the last minute, making a QR code falls off the list.
2. Most QR codes are links to the Internet, so what is that the advantage over a text URL? It can be quicker, I suppose, if the URL is long – but even that can be fixed using bit.ly or some other URL shortening service.

Still, even if you are clever enough to come up with something cool to do with a QR code, there are these little barriers that you have to get through on the audience side to make it work.

For those who argue that the biggest problem with QR codes is that they are ugly, I urge you to check out this gallery of QR codes, which take advantage of just how tolerant QR codes are to distortion. You can make some quite beautiful things with QR codes. (One shown at right.)

Don’t put anything critical for understanding of your poster on a QR code just yet.

Indeed, after I wrote the bulk of this article, a commenter in a previous post brought up that some companies, notably Google, are moving towards near-field communication (NFC) instead of QR codes for some purposes. As NFC relies on a chip, though, it is difficult to see them replacing QR codes in every situation.

Related posts

Smart posters
Too futuristic? Or already too passe?

Critique: Scaffolder

Michael Barton is the person behind this lovely poster, featured on his blog Bioinformatics Zen (no relation). Click to enlarge, as usual.

He has a blog post here describing what he was trying to do with the poster, and how he made it. The full post is good reading.

This poster has a strong sense of design and excellent use of colour. It’s a great example of breaking away from the traditional poster format (journal paper in a can), and cutting down the text to lower the intimidation factor.

The contrast between left and right sides of the poster is effective.

• The left side of the poster is about the problems of current methods. This gets reflected visually with the grungy background and chunky type.
• The right side of the poster offers clarity of the software. This is conveyed visually with ample white space, strong geometric figures, attractive colours, and the subtle sunburst background.

There may be room for some slight improvements.

On the right, some of the text is angled, some horizontal. I might have gone for all angled or all horizontal, as the feeling of “problems” is already very strong.

On the left, the text throughout may be slightly too fine to read easily. On my computer screen, the text boxes were difficult to read. A printer has higher resolution, though, so this might pass the “arm’s length” test, but perhaps just barely.

I am undecided about the circles to the right of the title. They add a nice graphic touch, and they tie in with the larger scaffold circle on the right. But they are crowding the title, and perhaps drawing too much attention to themselves.

Finally, the email down in the corner feels awkward. It’s out of alignment with everything, and it’s not where people will look for contact information. The alignment of the email got to me, so I fired up the graphics editor and played around with the poster a bit more.

In this revision, I tried to enhance the already strong geometric feel of the right hand side of the poster by aligning the text and boxes with each other. Now, every element lines up with at least one other element of the poster. If I was working from the original Inkscape file, I might have moved the last couple of circles on the left, and made other minor experiments.

But these are mere tweaks, idle alterations to a great piece of graphic design. Well done.

A big thanks to Michael for letting me feature this wonderful poster, and his reader, Guy Leonard, for suggesting it!

Related posts

The importance of alignment
Is it big enough? The “arm’s length” test

True artwork: the painted poster

It is incredibly rare to find a conference poster that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Believe me, I’ve been looking since I started this blog.

This is the first true show-stopper I’ve been able to feature; this is true artwork.

The artist is Karmella Haynes. Jonathan Eisen highlighted this gorgeous piece of poster in two posts here and here.

Typography for Lawyers: Sustained

The website Typography for Lawyers is a good resource. Author Matthew Butterick has experience as a typographer, and presents his craft very well.

I particularly like this quote, since it applies so emphatically to poster sessions:

I believe that most read­ers are look­ing for rea­sons to stop reading. Not because they’re mali­cious or aloof. They’re just being ratio­nal. If read­ers have other demands on their time, why should they pay any more atten­ion than they absolutely must? Read­ers are always look­ing for the exit.

Most of the website deals with smaller details needed for multi-page documents, rather than more complex layout of multiple parts on a single that is the problem for most poster makers. But there is good advice on how wide columns should be (two to three alphabets should fit in a single line), and tips on page layout, including this gem:

Don’t try to resolve typo­graphic deci­sions with logic.

The book is significantly longer than the website, but the website is helpful.

Clean solutions to a visual mess

Clean Up Your Mess is a short, very helpful website about visual design by Daniel Higgenbotham. It talks about things close to my heart at this blog, like alignment, boxism, and hierarchies.

Photo by Wonderdawg777 on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Printing posters

One reason that people like giving a talk more than a poster is that talk doesn’t have to be printed. While almost everyone has the computing power to make and display a PowerPoint talk, few have what they need to print a full-sized conference poster. Your options:

Own a large format plotter printer.

It’s not within reach of the typical conference goer to own their own personal big printer. This price list starts at $1,400 and ends at, “More than $4,700.” I’m too scared to see how much more.

Such a printer is not out of reach as a piece of shared equipment, though. Our department shares a plotter printer with another departments. The ink, paper, and so forth is paid for by various student fees and department budget. Students and faculty alike use it.

Our university library has a second plotter poster, which is smaller than our departmental printer. They also have a policy limiting people to one free poster, of a certain size (48 inches, I think) per semester.

If you are in an institution that does not have one, try to convince people that this is a useful resource.

Hire someone to print your poster.

Your first option is to go local. Check your local business directory and look either for “graphics” or “signs.”

Your second option is to use an online printing company. There are several that specialize in doing conference posters. Most are able to send you your poster by overnight courier the day after you submit it.

I’ve talked about some of the services offered by PosterSession. Their blog has inspired some posts of my own.

I’ve also recently learned about MakeSigns. Their website has a lot of resources, especially if you’re one of the many who still insist on using PowerPoint for posters. (I say again: There are better options!) In particular, they have a lot of PowerPoint templates at many different sizes.

Minor quibble: Their page on web graphics cautions against low resolution, which I have also done. But it doesn’t make it clear that an online graphic may be fine on a poster, regardless of the low dots per inch (DPI). The number of dots (pixels) of the picture when printed is what matters, not the screen resolution.

Example: An online picture that is 1,920 pixels wide at 96 DPI is 20 inches on screen. If you print that 5 inches wide on a poster, the resolution is 384 DPI, far more than you need. If you wanted to use that picture as a massive background 48 inches wide, however, you have 40 DPI and it would look terrible.

Print the poster in letter paper sized pieces.

This is favoured by people who just want to re-use their PowerPoint slides as posters. Print off each slide, glue them to some coloured paper, and there’s your poster.

These generally look quite poor. It is very difficult to get all the pieces glued down onto decent heavy paper, then tack up all the individual pieces so they are neatly aligned. Plus, most inkjet printers and standard letter paper don’t have the crispness of printing or the bright colours that you can get from a high end plotter printer.

Not recommended.

The edge effect

At a conference last week, I had two posters next to each other. The next day, I scribbled this in my notes:

I think the difference in traffic was not due to any inherent difference in the poster, either scientifically or graphically, but was because of the room layout.

All the posters in the session were mounted on single poster boards. Every single mounting board had one had one edge along a wall (or, in the center, a curtained room divider). This meant that poster viewers couldn’t walk along a row of posters. They had to walk in towards the wall, surrounded by posters on either side, over and over again.

Remember that people read from left to right, so the starting point of a poster is on the left edge.

The poster marked “more traffic” above has its left edge away from the wall. As soon as people walked into that cul-de-sac, they first thing they will tend to read will be the “more traffic” poster.

The poster on the right (marked “less traffic”) has its left edge next to the wall. To get to the start of this poster, people have to make their way all to the end of the cul-de-sac. The path might be blocked with people reading the other poster, or people reading the end of the poster they want to start reading.

One poster had an unfair advantage in attracting attention over the other.

And the moral of the story is: Conference organizers, think about the patterns of foot traffic in the poster session! They influence what posters get viewed the most.