Link roundup, April 2012

Jessica Morrison at I ♥ The Road asked for feedback on her conference poster. It’s an interesting design worth looking at (and I reply in the comments).

Nature Preceedings has been a home for achiving conference posters. It is closing up and not taking new submissions. Existing ones will stay. For more, see Retraction Watch.

I love this article about comic lettering, focusing on Stan Sakai’s work in Usagi Yojimbo. I’m not sure how much of a lesson there is for posters, but I don’t care.

You know the difference between a serif and a sans serif. But can you tell your geometric sans serifs from your humanist sans serifs? Jenny Ambrose explains.

Some logos are so well designed, and so distinctive, they transcend language.

Kristina Killgrove (who was here last week) wrote on Twitter:

#PPA2012 / #AAPA2012 need to have "prettiest poster" contest. Not just 'cause I think I would win, but to show what good posters look like.

Preach it!

Before & After Magazine has a lot of helpful articles. This short freebie PDF remakes a business card, and ideas there are useful to posters, too. I particularly like the principle, “Colour attracts, black explains.” This related one of my “rules of two”: Limit yourself to two typefaces and two colours. Use a fancy type, printed in colour, for headings: headings attract people. Use a simple type, printed in black, for the main text: that’s there to explain to people.

Likewise, another post from their site has this gem:

No story, no design. No design, no story. I can’t underscore this enough. Without story, design is decorating. Arranging colors and shapes looking for something “cool.” ...

Only once you have the story will you have something to design.

Another great guideline is revealed by Chip Kidd in his TED talk. Kidd credits an instructor a Pennsylvania State University, Lanny Sommese.

Show this:

Or type this:

Apple.

But never show this:

Because showing that is treating your audience like morons.

I now think of this as “the Sommese rule.”

Wired magazine has started a design section. While their manifesto seems to focus on “real stuff,” which I take to mean physical objects, rather than paper and text things, there may well be lessons to learn for those making conference posters.

Rosie Redfield has a nice post on conference networking, including how to handle a poster presentation:

At your poster: Maybe you’re explaining your poster to someone, thankful that it’s attracted at least a bit of interest, when a second person walks up. Don’t ignore them until the first visitor walks away! Make eye contact, smile, say ‘Hi, I’m just explaining how we collected our data. If you can wait a minute I'll be able to talk about our goals.’ Then continue your conversation, but make it easy for the new person to join in or ask questions.

Finally, thanks to John Hawks for the plug! Every bit helps, because there is still much work to do.

Critique: Italian cemeteries

This week, I’m featuring a poster by Kristina Killgrove, one the Killer Ks from Round 1 of of SciFund. She recently featured this poster at her Powered by Osteons blog here. Click for bigness!

The first thing that pops out are those circles. They draw the eye immediately and powerfully. Dividing the big outer circle it into quadrants ties each section of the circle to its accompanying text box.

The symmetrical layout might benefit from providing slightly stronger clues as whether to read down or across, perhaps in the headings.This is one case where numbered headings might have been welcome.

The attractiveness of the circles helps overcome that the text is a little on the dense side. Four moderate length paragraphs is not horrible, but any editing that could make the text more concise would make the poster more appealing.

Working with circle is tricky though, given that so many graphs are rectangular. The data in the upper right quadrant is coming perilously close to puncturing its border, both in the graph and table. The table is the worse offender of the two, particularly as it is covering part of the dividing line at the bottom. The table would be better off if it were smaller.

I have mixed feelings about the display text in the title. On the one hand, I like the distinctive flavour. On the other hand, it is a bit difficult to read at a glance, which is critical for a poster title. For example, look at how similar the shapes of the “L” and “I” are. Plus, it’s set in all capital letters.

The very bottom “fine print” boxes might have followed the colour scheme above, bringing more continuity to the whole poster. The cost of doing that, however, might have been less clarity in differentiating which parts are data, and which parts are not.

My favourite part of this poster, though, is a detail that might be overlooked. But there’s a delightful little Easter egg for those paying attention...

Related posts

The eye loves the circle
The uphill battle for QR codes

Critique: Neuropsychology of schizophrenia

Update, 8 February 2016: This post has been taken down at the request of the submitter.



Additional: Laura has started blogging here.

Critique: Priming

Today’s poster comes from Alejandro de la Vega, and is used with his permission.

My big concern with this is the reading order. Here’s a “red line”to show the order you’re expected to look at the pieces:

The poster starts off going down in columns, which makes you think when you get to the Methods section that you should keep reading down. But no! Suddenly, you’re snaking back and forth across the page.

This is a major structural problem, and everything else is comparatively minor.

Something you can’t see on small pictures is a little detail in the graph. You may have to click to enlarge to see that the yellow bar in the graph has cross-hatching in it. The differences in colours are so obvious, and the cross hatching is so subtle, though, that the graph would be better off without them.

Speaking of graphs, the error bars on both graphs are unlabelled. And error bars only need go in one direction.

In the text, the bullet points do not clearly distinguish between the main points and less important sub-points. To put it another way, the hierarchy of information is not clear. All the text is the same size. All the bullets are the same size. Using smaller text and different bullets (perhaps open rather than filled) for the secondary points would help.

The only cue that some points are major and some are minor is the indenting. And even that isn’t handled well. Bullet points look better when the text of the second and later lines are aligned with the first word of the top line.That is,

● This is how points are currently displayed;
with words left aligned with bullets.

• But it would be better if they looked like this,
  with words left aligned with other words.

There are other little typographic nits with symbols. There’s a letter X instead of a multiplication symbol (×), and a hyphen and greater than symbol (->) instead of a proper arrow (→).

Finally, I would just use the lighter blue that the text is on for the whole poster. The darker blue just makes the poster more “boxy” and complicated visually.

Colour clash

What should you wear to a poster session? Never mind the formal versus casual versus comfortable dilemma, what colour should you wear? A nearly decade old paper making the social media rounds last week suggests looking at your poster while picking your outfit.

Several people, knowing I’m the poster blog guy, asked me what I thought.

The authors themselves write:

Our study had several limitations.

This is an understatement. This study, by Keegan and Bannister, is almost nothing but limitations. It’s as lightweight as this:

The hypothesis is that having the presenter’s clothes match the colour of the poster will result in more visits to the poster. The design of the experiment is actually not bad. The authors show a statistically significant decrease in poster visits when the presenter was wearing clothing that did not match the colour of the poster. This is also supported by ad hoc observations of poster visitors:

5 people were overheard by the observer during the clashing-attire phase to say that the presenter’s blouse did not match her poster, and none visited the poster.

Let’s run through some interpretive issues.

1. The test poster had not one, but four colours on it: blue, lavender, green and yellow. This makes it tricky to say the lavender blouse “matched” the poster colour. It matched a colour, but not all.

I took the colour with the largest surface showing in the picture, and also closest to the presenter’s eye level - green - and placed it into Kuler. The picture below shows the suggested complementary colours using the “triad” model.

The colours at the end, a purple and a gold, are not too different from the other colours in the poster. This suggests that coordination might be a more appropriate description than simple matching.

If I take the same base green and select a “complementary” colour scheme:

I get a suggestion for an orange-brown that is not too far off from the rust worn as the “clashing” colour. Designers often use such contrast colours to make subjects “pop”. For example, red rose petals look redder next to the green leaves of the rose.

2. There is no control for the clothing colour itself, isolated from the matching to the poster. The authors acknowledge this, noting:

People may have decided to not visit the poster... because they did not like the rust blouse regardless of whether it coordinated with the poster(.)

There is no accounting for what colours look good on this presenter. Some people look great in particular colours and terrible in others (I happen to think I look stunning in purple).

This is particularly an issue given that the clashing colour is nearly red. There have been many suggestions that red signals all sorts of things in humans (Changizi et al. 2006, Elliot et al. 2007, Elliot & Niesta 2008), including aggression (Hill & Barton 2005), though the latter has been contentious. Just wearing something reddish may drive away visitors. To test this, you’d have to do an experiment with a red poster; you’d predict lower numbers of visits with the presenter wearing lavender blouse if Keegan and Bannister’s paper is correct.

3. Joshua Drew asks:

(W)hat about if it was a dude who was clashing?

Indeed. You could fill entire libraries have been written about gender expectations, particularly with regards to appearances. It’s an open question if this effect would persist if the presenter were male.

4. The definition of a “visitor” at the a poster includes people looking at it. This would include mere glances of people walking by. It would be interesting to see the data broken down by those looking versus the number talking to the presenter. The numbers would be smaller, but might be a more meaningful measure of poster popularity.

Especially given that we don’t know how the details of the conference. If it’s a busy conference in a small space, with tables in the middle of the walkway (I’ve seen this), you almost can’t look at anything else, because you’re stuck in foot traffic.

5. Two presenters at two posters at one meeting. The sample is tiny. This is barely even a preliminary study. The authors themselves admit:

It would have been ideal to have conducted this study during several poster sessions; however, funding limited us to one medical education conference, which had only one poster session.

Given the large number of people who go to multiple conferences a year, perhaps the authors could have rounded up some more volunteers rather than going it alone.

This paper has been cited three times according to Web of Knowledge, and eight times according to Google Scholar. But nobody ought to take this research too seriously yet. This needs replication and a more robust study design. If anyone wants to collaborate on replicating and extending this experiment, let me know.

In the meantime, remember that black goes with everything.

References

Changizi MA, Zhang Q, Shimojo S. 2006. Bare skin, blood and the evolution of primate colour vision. Biology Letters 2(2): 217-221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2006.0440

Elliot AJ, Maier MA, Moller AC, Friedman R, Meinhardt J. 2007. Color and psychological functioning: The effect of red on performance attainment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136(1): 154-168.

Elliot AJ, Niesta D. 2008. Romantic red: Red enhances men’s attraction to women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95(5): 1150-1164.

Hill RA, Barton RA. 2005. Psychology: Red enhances human performance in contests. Nature 435(7040): 293-293. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/435293a

Keegan DA, Bannister SL. 2003. Effect of colour coordination of attire with poster presentation on poster popularity. Canadian Medical Association Journal 169(12): 1291-1292. PMID: 14662667. http://www.cmaj.ca/content/169/12/1291.full

Related links

Dress sense
Google Plus discussions here and here.

Hat tip to Liz Neeley for this lead.

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

Link roundup, March 2012

Here are four lessons in networking from someone who was lucky enough to go to this year’s TED conference. But in truth, these apply to going to any conference.:

1. Perfect your introduction.
2. Have a purpose.
3. Listen.
4. Connect with people who aren’t aligned with your goals.

You should read the whole thing.

Jim Campbell advocates for simplicty in design. He’s talking about logos, but this is true for posters, too:

No amount of icing and sprinkles will disguise the fact that your cake isn't properly cooked; pretty much the same principle with logos.

You think you have pressure when you make a poster? Check out this article on Fergus Wessel, who makes stuff written in stone. Literally. I was amazed by this:

How do you achieve good letter spacing? Do you use a ruler?

By eye, I never use a ruler! With a ruler one is limited to set measurements and sometimes a letter needs to be moved “by a nothing.” I judge good letter-spacing by visualizing an equal volume between letters. This skill is achieved by having the patience to start drawing out an inscription all over again if it doesn’t look perfect. We call this “killing one’s darlings” and it takes a lot of self discipline.

Poster session 2032

“Paper‽”

It was good that the restaurant wasn’t quiet, so the postdoc’s interrobang didn’t distract the other tables nearby.

“That’s right. When we first went to Neuroscience, you had to print your poster on this big sheet of paper.”

“Oh yeah,” the other researcher added. “The first year we went, there wasn’t even a smartphone app for the conference or anything.”

“A paper poster sound really inefficient, Dr. S,” another grad student said.

“It kind of was. We had this big plastic tube that our boss used to carry our posters on the plane.”

“We kept offering to carry it, but I don’t think he trusted us.”

“Well, you did miss the flight back home.”

The researcher didn’t take her colleague’s bait. “I think the first time they switched away from posterboards to the first eboards was about 2020.”

“A lot of people didn’t do that for the first few years, though. The first eboards were only black and white, like the early ebook readers, and couldn’t handle any animation. But it was soooo much better than hauling the poster tube around. Download the file, arrive at the meeting, and the poster got displayed in the right place during your session.”

A waiter arrived. “Who had the gluten-free pizza?”

“That’s hers,” the researcher said, pointing across the table. “A lot of people stuck with paper for a few years, for the colours. Remember that first year we actually saw someone who had tacked a bunch of eight and half by eleven pages up on a board?”

“Right! I’d forgotten about that one! But I think the first few years when they went to the colour eboards were worse than that, though, because you could add in the video and animation. The first time, if we wanted to show video, we had people scanning codes on our poster and they’d look at it on their smart phone. Or we’d show it on our netbook.”

“Netbook?” asked the postdoc.

“They were the small portable computers that were out just before the first tablets. But yeah, people went nuts with the animation and special effects. I kept expecting a someone to have an epileptic fit walking through the poster session. But most people eventually stopped that.”

“Most. Ugh, there are still some ugly posters out there.”

“Well, if people didn’t keep finishing their posters on the plane...” she said, looking pointedly at the postdoc, who looked sheepish.

“But,” said the student, trying to change the subject, “are the poster sessions better than they used to be?”

The two PIs looked at each other for a second. “Easier...” said the first, with the second finished the sentence, “...but not necessarily better.”

This post was inspired by Leon at B.A.N.T.E.R. After that, similar ideas were put forward by Jon Bardin and DrugMonkey (here and here).