Link roundup for March 2013

Karl Fast manages to neatly summarize my approach to posters on this blog (hat tip to Julie Dirksen):

Design is not about right and wrong, or even good and bad. It's about better or worse. It's about a spectrum and improvement.

Girls Are Geeks has an nice introduction to typography, including a list of resources, starting points, and ways to learn. I love how Dawn describes “typography fandom.”

So it’s really no surprise that I grew into the typography fandom. And now you can get excited about it too!

Indeed, in her “about” page, Dawn says one of her geekouts is, “Good use of white space in logos.”

Colin Purrington looks at word count in posters. I particular love that it has a “kids these days” comment. Now, everyone get off Colin’s lawn.

Critique: Mozzie genes

Today’s poster is courtesy of Brantley Hall. Click to enlarge...

Brantly writes that this poster was partially inspired by two others that have been featured here, both of which featured circles. He writes:

I liked the two recent posters that had a circular layout, I couldn’t get it to work for my content. Instead, I made a series of golden rectangles with slight compromises for the border around the squares. A rectangular section for the title would ruin the golden rectangles, so I drew sections of a golden spiral in the two biggest sections for the title and authors.

The spiral is ambitious. It gives the poster a distinct look, but the order imposed by the spiral is so strong that is works against normal reading order. When I first glanced at it, the arc of blue and gold lead me to jump straight from the Introduction to the Results, skipping over the lower left corner. Brantley confirmed in email to me that the poster is meant to be read as two columns. However, the lower right is the least important for a general audience, and is mainly there for bioinformatics experts.

Looking at it from a distance, I’m worried people would be drawn to the right side instead of the left, like so:

Everything else about this poster is very nice. There’s not too much material. The colours are well chosen. Blue and gold predominate, and they are a classic colour combination, used over and over again. The pointy edges of the text don’t come too close to the curves and threaten to “pop” them.

You can also see his poster on Prezi.

Related posts

Critique: Italian cemeteries
Critique: Bison dung fungus

Critique and makeover: Peptides

Today’s poster comes from Triet Nguyen, who will be a grad student starting this fall. Click to enlarge...

When I first looked at this, I noticed that the poster switches from an up-down reading order (left column) to a left-right reading order (right two thirds). It’s particularly puzzling given that the wide rows are divided into twos, which could be rearranged into columns with little difficulty. Here’s a quick and dirty redo:

This is not ideal, because in the original poster, the top row is taller than the bottom one. Consequently, my version of the left column has more white space than the new middle column. The columns are uneven, too. Those could be fixed with little adjustments to proportions. This would take time, because this is a poster with a lot of individual pieces.

Notwithstanding all of that, one tall and two wides is actually fine! My preference for columns is mainly a stylistic choice, and the reading order here is not confusing. The use of panels clarifies the reading order, and I like that the panels are done with a little subtlety. The panels are shaped by white space against a coloured background, and not by hard black lines around each panel.

Within each panel, there are a lot of individual parts, as noted above. A stronger use of alignment would certainly help bring a greater sense of order to the poster. In the example below, I’ve put down a few lines along the edge of one object. In general, that line crosses through several objects on the page

I’m not a fan of university logos in general, particularly not in the prime real estate of the upper left corner. I suggest flipping it with the title: title left, logo right. Perhaps like this:

Given that the title is not centered on the page in either version, however, there’s no reason to center the author list and institution under the title. Left aligning might be stronger, especially in my redesign above.

Some of the typography is a little awkward, particularly the bullet lists. The bullets look too close to the text. Hanging indents would emphasize the bullets more. The numbered list in the left column suffers because the text varies in how far it is from the numbers.

Similarly, bold or italics are usually better solutions for emphasis than underlining.

The figures have a lot of fine detail, and I’m not sure how visible that will be from a distance. For instance, the fine gridlines in the figure on the bottom left are probably just going to make the figure look muddy when seen at a distance rather than as distinct lines. I’m not sure what can be done, apart from constantly asking, “Can I take this out? Can I make this bigger?”

Related posts

The epic logo post
Poster real estate
Learning from Cosmo

External links

Forgotten wisdom (Part One)

More than marketing

I gave a presentation about conference posters today. I talked about many of the tips that I often talk about on this blog: the importance of an entry point, using grids for layout, the advantages of Microsoft Publisher, and no effin’ Comic Sans.

At the end, someone commented that my presentation was all about marketing. It was true that I repeatedly reminded students that nobody has to stop and read their posters.

I said, “It’s about beauty. It’s about elegance. What is the highest compliment that a mathematician can pay to a mathematical proof? That it is elegant. Yes, it’s true that I am assuming that your science is sound. But it isn’t worth a damn if nobody reads it.”

I also had a little l’esprit de l’escalier on what a well-designed poster says about its creator. It shows that you understand what is important. A poster almost always demands you leave stuff out, which means you have to make decisions about what to include, exclude, and emphasize. Thus, you can only arrive at a beautiful, well-made poster if you have a deep understanding of the research you are presenting on it.

A well-made poster shows mastery of the material, not just tricks to grab attention.

It’s a little surprising to me that while this blog has been going for four years, this is only the second time I’ve given a talk about posters. And I also caught myself saying, “Let anarchy reign!” for a second time (regarding requests to include needless logos or abstracts).

Fourth birthday

Four solid years of poster advice! Hooray!

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

Link roundup for February 2013

On Quora, a great question and answer: can anyone recognize the difference between good design and bad design?

Tired of “lorem ipsum” for quick layouts? Blokk is the typeface for you.

I salute Alexis Rudd’s graphic talent, earned by photoshopping video game characters:

Who says all that time spent photoshopping Final Fantasy VII characters in high school was a waste? BAM! SCIENCE!

See, it doesn’t matter how you learn graphic skills. They will reward you sooner or later.

The AAAS / Science magazine awards for “visualization challenge” includes a poster category. This year’s winner triumphed, I think, because of the interesting question (“How can owls turn their heads around so far?”) combined with the craft necessary to make very good anatomical drawings.

Seth Godin on things we want from conferences:

Open, generous and connected(.) Isn't that what we seek from a co-worker, boss, friend or even a fellow conference attendee? ... Paradoxically, the fancier the conference, the more fabled the people around the table, the less likely you are to find these attributes.

If your at a desktop, this colour picker might not work for you. But if you have a touchscreen enabled, oh my, this is fun! Hat tip to Simon Bostock.

Critique and makeover: Glow worms

The last few weeks on the blog, I’ve been talking about the power of using found objects to inspire design. This week, Bronwyn Carlisle provides us with another excellent example. It won third prize in the conference it was shown. You can click to enlarge:

Bronwyn’s commentary (slightly edited):

It was a horrible poster to have to design. The main problem was that monstrous table. It had to be there (it was the result), and it had to be legible. I had to use a narrow font to make it fit, and I rearranged the table itself to make it less confusing. Everything else had to fit around the table. But it was the last part of the poster, so it had to go at the end. I also had short wide tables that needed to fit in panels 2 & 3, along with taller, narrower, graphs. In general, it was a nightmare jigsaw.

I sympathize. Tall posters in portrait format are always difficult. The “nightmare jigsaw” problem was not quite beat in the layout. The lack of clear columns create a jagged split dividing the poster.

Unfortunately, this is problem that I don’t know how to fix quickly. One possibility would be to go back to the graphing software and redraw the graphs on the right hand side to make them fit the proportions of their space more closely. Making them wider would at least make the right edges align, enhancing the sense that there is an underlying grid.

A second issue I have is one where I do have a suggestion. As regular readers know, I’m not a fan of boxes. Here, the big, thick black lines that form the box in the upper right feels particularly heavy handed. Given that this poster overall has a light, almost airy touch to it, the box does not mesh with the rest of the poster.

My suggestion is to use a box implied by colour, rather than one described by thick lines. I used the eyedropper tool to grab the colour of the “antique” image of the animal just to the left of the box, drew a new rectangle with that colour, and put the text on top.

One benefit of this is that by tying the text box and the figure together with the same colour, it binds the top into a single row. The thick-lined box pulls away from the rest, and enhances the split between the left and the right.

Bronwyn continues:

You will notice that I departed from custom and put the authors at the very top. Personally, I really like it.

This works fine. Even though the authors are at the top, there is still a clear sense of hierarchy. The authors’ names and affiliation are small compared to the title, so the title is clearly the most important thing. Also, this brings the title a bit closer to eye level, which is also beneficial.

I think if I were to do it again, I’d put that bottom banner (containing the “punchline”) in the middle of the poster, above the interpretation section. It makes a nice bottom frame where it is, but is a bit too low for its importance.

Finally, the inspiration for this poster came from... jewellery store advertising emails!

And the moral of this story is: Design is everywhere, so inspiration is everywhere.

Additional: After I posted this, I got another email from Bronwyn with her own redesign. Click to enlarge:

Moving the banner to the middle of the poster turns out to solve several problems. It clearly clearly defines the reading order: go in rows. It also fixes the “break” running like a river through the vertical in the earlier version. Yes, there is still a box, but it is nowhere near as distracting as in the previous version, perhaps because the box is now in proximity to the two black bands above and below it, rather than out on its own.