Link roundup, July 2012

Creating graphics, not with character, but with characters. I’ll bet some posters could use this technique well.

Ecologist Stephen S. Hale has written a field guide to conferences. His advice on posters is... memorable.

You have to compete for attention. Say you’re standing by your poster, hardly anyone has stopped by yet, and you’re trying not to look too anxious. How to get people to stop and talk to you rather than all those other poster people? You see someone come into your group of posters; she’s darting her eyes quickly over the various titles. You strain to read her name tag. If she edges closer, set the hook by smiling and asking “May I talk you through this?” Pretend you’re a male bowerbird; you’ve built this elaborate structure and you want to get a female to join you inside. The principle of sexual selection says that reproduction (of ideas, in this case) only occurs if the person you’re trying to attract chooses your structure over the many competing ones. So you’ve got to make your poster bold, colorful, and interesting.

If you’re wondering what a bowerbird is, look no further:







Methinks his profession may have coloured his perspective somewhat.

I think Seth Godin’s instruction here can apply to posters:

No one is going to read the whole thing, ever again. But we need to make it much easier to read the part of the thing that someone really cares about.

Check out Steven Hamblin, who describes his design process for making a poster If you haven’t done a poster yet, you should read this. It gives an excellent sense for why a poster is not something you knock out in an afternoon.

- 10:36 p.m. Am I seriously still in the lab? It’s time to go home.

We’ve all been there, Steven.

Ed Yong attacks jargon and leaves it in a body cast. There are a lot of lessons here in writing text for your poster. For instance (my emphasis):

Writing is a constant battle for attention. Filling prose with jargon, and failing to consider the all-important audience, ensures that you lose the battle before you’ve even published a pixel. Nobody has ever felt obliged to read. Don’t give them reasons to stop.

 

Comic CERN

I get you, CERN.

You think it should be all about the content, right? The discovery of the Higgs boson is the important thing.

But instead, you get these:

From Crackajack.

From Dropping the Science.

From Ed’s slipper.

Sure, you have supporters. Brian Cox backs you up. Some people are petitioning to change the name of Comic Sans to Comic CERN.

Still, you had to know what you were in for on July 4^th, since you did the same thing, and got the same reaction, back in December of 2011. So I have to ask, CERN, did you use Comic Sans to get a reaction, or are you being stubborn?

Because I get that.

I wear a tie for no one. I wear T-shirts and jeans most of the time. And I can’t be bothered to cut my hair very often. And it’s partly to get a reaction and mainly because I’m stubborn. These are no doubt deep flaws in my character. But it is a conscious decision I’ve made.

Now, I’ve made my feelings about Comic Sans known on this blog and elsewhere several times. I think you can do better, CERN. You should look at articles like this one by David Kadavy on why Comic Sans gets so much flak.

If you deliberately chose to use Comics Sans, fine. I disagree, but no matter. A big message of this blog is that design is all about making conscious decisions. If you choose to use Comic Sans, that’s okay... as long as you understand the price you’ll be paying.

External links

Higgs in Comic Sans: the right font for physics?
Higgs boson researchers mocked for using Comic Sans font
Why you hate Comic Sans

Critique: Biomaterials

Today’s poster was submitted by Jessica Moore, who is manager of Center of Excellence in Nanomedicine at the University of California, San Diego, and is shown with her permission. She sent me two posters, and we’ll see the other one later.

A poster’s title should always win fight for attention easily. It isn't here. There is too much stuff going on around it. You have a text based logo in the “primetime” upper left corner, a lot of names, and headings in boxes, and the poster’s title isn’t much bigger than any of those. People won’t be able to pick out the title at a glance, and they are likely to walk by.

I like that the “Motivation” for the poster is called out at the top, but I’m having a hard time identifying what the main result or conclusion is.

The reading order has a mix of top to bottom and left to right directions. The lower left corner in particular seems to deviate a bit from the pattern established by the rest of the poster.

But even though the reading order is reasonably apparent, it looks jumbled and confused within each larger section because so few things are aligned with each other. A stronger underlying grid layout would help.

Similarly, not a lot of things match in terms of shape or colour. There are boxes with round corners and boxes with square corners. There are white headings on dark blue backgrounds and black text on medium blue backgrounds. Some lines are gold, some blue.

Let’s see what happens if we cut out a bunch of those boxes:

Finally, this “IOP” graph on the left side just scares me.

Even if I stopped to look at this poster, I would want to flee as soon as I saw this graph. Eleven colours by seven groupings? I can feel my eyes glazing over just typing the description. This graph needs a serious re-think. Perhaps some of the data in a category could be collapses to show the main effects more easily, or changed to a line graph, or something.

Critique: Bison dung fungus

I’m pleased that Jacquelyn Gill took time out from preparing for her doctoral dissertation today (which you can watch live at 1:00 pm Central time!) to provide me with a poster for critique. It’s one of the first examples of a poster that has some elements featured in another poster I critiqued on this blog. Click to enlarge!

Recognize the influence? It’s from Kristina Killgrove, whose poster was featured back in April! Both divided the poster into elliptical quadrants.

On Kristina’s poster, I noted a problem was confusion about whether to read across or down. Jacquelyn’s answer to this is to provide a clear, but unobtrusive, cue in the center of the poster, with numbers showing the reading order.

Within each quadrant, the multiple rows and columns make it a little tricky to decipher the order I’m supposed to look at the figures in. I’m pretty sure it’s from left to right, though.

As I mentioned with Kristina’s poster, it is difficult to fit much some material into curved spaces. Graphs, in particular, are rectangular, and they need a lot of space around the corners to avoid the “about to pop the balloon” tension. Jacquelyn generally does a good job of this on the top. Not having top or right axes on the graphs helps. The bottom graphs are less comfortable, particularly on the right.

I am generally against putting text on photographic backgrounds. It’s not bad here, though, because the top half is just a colour. The bottom, though, could be more of a problem. I would have tried to make the interiors of the ellipses even a bit more opaque, though perhaps not completely white. In particular, quadrant 3 in the lower left has graphs with the finest details on top of the background.

The circles on either side of the top quadrants are nice little attractions for passers by. I would have put a bison picture in the upper left if possible. The upper left is the more critical position, and the bison is more recognizable than the fungus (at least, I’m presuming that’s what’s in the upper left circle). Normally, I’d mirror the picture Jacquelyn used to make the bison looked to the right, into the text. The numbers on the ear tags would make this tricky to do for this picture, as they reversed numbers would give the effect away!

The poster uses classic movie poster colours, orange and blue, for some contrasting “pop.”

Jacquelyn shares a poster from a couple of years ago by way of comparison. She called it “awful”, but I have to say, it’s far from the worst I’ve seen. Yes, there’s a lot of text, but at least the reading order is plain.

I’d have to agree that her new poster is better, though!

Postscript: That’s Doctor Gill now. She succesfully defended her thesis.

Link roundup, June 2012

The National Science Foundation’s program, IGERT is hosting a virtual poster session. I haven’t had time to peruse them in detail, but if you see a cool one, let me know!

More online infographics applications are appearing: http://infogr.am/ and http://venngage.com/. Be careful using these!

Conference! The Game from NeuroSkeptic.

I’m often telling people to make things bigger. Here, John McWade takes this advice to the extreme.



You can drive yourself crazy trying to find something that sets you apart from the crowd. A look at the creation of logos at the Design Observer Observatory.

Here’s a book on Spacing and Arrangement of Type that shows how not to do it.

Lora Innes gives advice on laying out comic pages that has lessons for conference poster makers, too. Like this:

The moment your reader wonders, “Where do I go next?” you’ve lost them. It’s like seeing a boom mic in a movie shot. Illusion destroyed.

Prof-Like Substance has several guides on how to use Adobe Illustrator.

We call it “bait” because it’s so irresistable: 100 beautiful free fonts.

The most valuable movie poster in the world is going up for auction.

Finally, Bora Zivcovik was kind enough to make this his blog of the week near the end of May.

Abstract abolition!

Don’t put an abstract on your poster.

Conference posters are summaries.

Poster are condensed versions of a scientific story. Posters should be something that you can walk someone through in a few minutes. Posters should be self contained: everything is there in one place.

But many research stories are complex. This means that you are often pressed for space on a poster, even if the conference organizers have generously sized poster boards. If you look at the critiques on this blog, you’ll see that one of the most common complaints I have is “crowded.”

Why, oh why, would you ever put an abstract on a poster?

Abstracts are useful things for scientific papers: they allow you to get the gist of a story and figure out if the whole paper is worth reading. They are useful for conference booklets for the same reason.

But if you’re standing at a poster... you don’t need to look at an abstract to whether to look at the poster. You can look at the poster itself.

This seems to arise out of the unrelenting desire to make everything follow the standard format of academic papers. But posters are not papers.

Now, some conferences deliberately instruct poster presenters to put conference abstracts on their posters. In the past, I have done this because I want to follow instructions. They’re usually there for a reason. But I have had it with that. I’m going rogue. Because it’s a rule without consequences. Nobody ever checks posters.

Conference organizers, I’m asking you nicely this one time: stop telling people to put abstracts on posters.

Putting an abstract on a conference poster is liking writing a haiku about a limerick.

Related posts

Breaking the hourglass for headlines that holler

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

Critique: Heparin

Today’s poster comes from Chloe Gallagher. Click to enlarge!

My biggest concern is the triangle and three boxes that run into both the Introduction and the Methods. I keep looking at it, and it confuses me. I don't understand which section of the poster it relates to. It needs to be placed clearly in one section or the other.

I like the art deco type used in the title; it adds a little elegance. I would have used it for the section headings, too.

The logo next to the name is reasonably unobtrusive, but why does it have to show up again in the lower right corner?

The results section looks thrown together. There’s no consistency of colour, of labelling (Table 2? Where’s Table 1?), and none of the graphs align.

While I kind of like the box defining equipoise as a graphic element, it feels out a place. I usually expect to find basic definitions at the front of something rather than the end.