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Kamis, 02 Juni 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Notorious DRG - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s contribution is from Zach Sperry, who gave me permission to share his poster from the 2015 Neuroscience meeting. Click to enlarge!


Nobody should be embarrassed by a poster like this. The core design of this poster is solid. It�s a clean, three column layout that leaves no doubt as to how it should be read.

But... there is a lot going on in this poster. It might have benefited from the four tips on shortening posters I had just a few weeks ago.

Things I might do:

Take the university and lab logos in the title bar out. This would allow you to shorten the author and institutions credits from five lines to maybe two, and make the title bigger.

I cannot emphasize this enough: at big meetings, your title needs to be visible from the moon. Big meetings set poster boards far apart to have aisles for people to walk in. And Neuroscience in the biggest of the big. Do not skimp on space for your title!

As journalists say, this poster has buried the lede. The �Goal� statement is crystal clear, but it�s buried at the bottom of the first section, and the italics are not enough of a signal to show its importance. I like the clarity of the �Goal� statement so much that I might just hack that whole section down to that one sentence.

Try shrinking everything by 5-10% and increasing the white space between each individual element.

The text blocks are quite dense and dark. The typeface appears to be plain ol� Arial. I might try a thinner typeface and less bolding to make the text blocks look lighter.

There are quite a lot of bright colours on the poster, with red, green, orange, and blue all making appearances. While the area they cover is small, which generally favours those more intense colours, there are still a lot of them, which contributes to the feeling of business. They make sense in the graphs on the right, but the intense red for labels in the central bottom figure, or to make outlines in the right figure (�Cell bodies (blue pixels) transformed...�) might be a little too much.

Like the introduction, I would like the conclusion to be much tighter. The first of those three paragraphs alone might be enough. It tells you the two key take-home messages:

  1. The recording worked.
  2. We got new information from this recording.

Kamis, 21 April 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Red ware - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s contribution comes from Scott Van Keuren. This poster recently graced the halls of the Society for American Archaeology meeting.Click to enlarge!


This a poster that has the right ideas, but doesn�t go far enough.

The title is excellent. It�s big, clean, and clear. I appreciate that this carries through the author listings, which are simpler than many posters. The logos are sensibly placed, unobtrusively, in the fine print section of the poster.

There are excellent photographs of physical objects, particularly in that critical left hand side. I would have like to have seen fewer, bigger pictures, even if that meant reducing the size of maps somewhat.

The headings also show consideration for the reader. Instead of the standard �IMRAD� headings,we mostly get questions that make it extremely clear which section of the poster is. If anything, I would like to see them bigger and more prominent. And that�s particularly valuable, because the rest of the poster sometimes leads you on a merry chase.

In the picture below, the red lines traces the order sections are meant to be read in, as I understand them:


The first column is very simple, but things take turns for the worse in the next two sections. Wrapping the scatter plots around the �What are results?� section particularly disturbs the reading flow; you have to jump a graph to get to the text, then back up to look at the scatter plots. In fact, the more I look at the poster, the less sure I am that the intended order is what I put above.

While the headings are so useful in guiding the reader, the amount I would have to read to get an answer to each question is a little intimidating. Even though I realize intellectually that the writing is not that much if it was an article, my eyes would glaze over in a poster hall.

Cutting is hard. You need to be ruthless, and you need to practice. But being concise is almost always the right way to go.

Kamis, 14 April 2016

Latest modern science | Critique and makeover: Gene sequence toolkit - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s poster is from Kasey Pham, and is used with permission. Click to enlarge!


Kasey writes:

I�m a student having a little trouble with my first poster presentation. I�d like to cut down the text more so that there's more white space, but I'm already having trouble keeping the story coherent.

It�s certainly nowhere near the worst I�ve seen in terms of amount of text. It seems that the main areas to edit are the introduction and the conclusion. My crack at condensing the intro was to use Randy Olson�s �And But Therefore� template:

�Every individual of a species should share a common ancestor, and this can be tested using public data, but those data are sparse, therefore we created a tool.�

I think I�m closing in on shrinking your four paragraphs down to once sentence. But I don�t know what �sparse� data means in this context, therefore I�m not sure what problem the toolkit solves.

Cutting the conclusions are more important than the intro, because that could give space around the references and acknowledgements, which currently look crowded. I wanted hack down the conclusions from five bullet points to... um... fewer. One paragraph is a challenge, but a worthwhile one.

Editing is always a bear, and the only real way to do it is with practice and constantly reminding yourself to be ruthless.

In other areas...

I�m a fan of consistent reading order, so I don�t like how the middle section switches from the reading down that you see in the left columns (the introduction flows down to methods), to reading across in the middle (Figure 1 flows across to Figure 2, then carriage returns to Figure 3, etc.). That said, the use of a horizontal line between Figures (1 + 2) and (3 + 4) is enough of a cue to prevent the reader from getting too lost.

In the Methods, it looks odd to have only the top box (�Raw XML data�) narrower than all the rest. It would also be nice for the left edge of the flowchart to align with the left edge of the text above.

Here�s a quick and dirty revision that addresses a few of these comments:


Jumat, 04 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Critique double feature: Grunge vision - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s contributions come from Martin Rolfs. He�s kindly permitting me to show not one, but two posters. Click to enlarge!


This one was presented at the 2014 Vision Sciences Society meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida.

There�s a few notable elements here. First, the authors have put picture of themselves. I�m not a huge fan of this approach, but these photos are relatively unobtrusive, good images, and they help with the overall �street wall� aesthetic.

I love that the first part of the poster is titled, �What�s this about?�, which gets to the point and fits the informal graphic style of the poster. From there, things flow well to the experiment, results, and conclusion. I was a little unsure when I was supposed to read �Determining the time course� in the lower left corner, though.

Here�s the second poster, presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Belgrade, 2014.


This one is, in my mind, a little less successful than the first.

The poster again starts strong with �What this is about�. But after that, the reading order is less clear. Perhaps because this poster is in portrait orientation rather than landscape, the material on this poster is too crowded together. For example, the Y axis label is almost touching the arrow emerging from �Evidence for signal�. The results and the all important bottom line are not as clearly highlighted and differentiated as in the previous poster.

The colour scheme also feels less successful; the bright yellows feel a little too garish for my taste. Likewise, I think the idea of using red and green in the title is to exemplify chromatic contrast, but when I look at the title, I just think of Christmas. The colours in the title might violate the Sommese rule: type it, or show it, but don�t do both.

Martin�s posters are fascinating because they have a strong graphic sensibility, which is rare enough in academia. But even more rare is something that embraces grunge typography. Some examples of the form, courtesy of a Google image search:


This is not a neat look. There is splatter and rough edges. Despite the rough look, it takes skill to bring it all together. I appreciate Martin�s skill in creating such a strong visual identity for his posters.

External links

The rise and fall of grunge typography

Kamis, 18 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Manta ray thoughts - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s contribution comes from Kenneth Chin. Click to enlarge!


Let me get to a couple of good things before moving to the ways it could be improved. First, the title is big and cannot be missed. If a title truly is 90% of your communication effort (as I�ve argued elsewhere), this poster is ahead of the game.

Second, there are lots of pictures of charismatic animals, including up at the top at eye level. It helps to have a subject that people generally like. I don�t know of anyone who hates manta rays.

Third, the main organization is a simple pair of columns. The reading order is not confusing.

That said, there are more frustrating things on this poster than good things. This poster is a compendium of common pitfalls.

There is way to much text, way too close together. That the poster is so dense calls attention to awkward dead spaces in the poster, shown in red below.


I tried a quick and dirty edit to move sections apart by shrinking the text and images a bit. I also took away the box around the conclusions and bar chart.

Even though the edit creates its own problems (makes alignment worse), it now has a little room to breath.

In the edit above, I flipped the order of the figures. Originally, Figure 7 appears on top of Figure 6. Also, there are two diagrams labelled �Figure 5.�

While the text is a clean sans serif, the bulk of it would be better in regular type instead of italics.

This poster needs to go back almost to the very beginning. The strongest course of action would be to give this poster a ruthless edit. Cut down the amount of material dramatically. Keep one big picture of a manta ray, show one graph of data, and list one to three major conclusions instead of nine(!).

But there is room for improvement even without going back that far in concept. Take off almost all the text and pictures. Make a grid. Draw lines for two evenly spaced columns, with a wide space between them, and wide margins. Make all those text and picture edges line up perfectly. Make sure every text block is an inch from pictures, and vice versa.

A clean two column layout is hidden deep in this poster; I can see hints of it. A disciplined adherence to a grid would reveal it, and leave an acceptable poster.

After I wrote all of the above, but before Kenneth had read it, he sent me a new version of his poster:


We�d converged on many of the same solutions! The major one is that the poster is now in two clean columns. Regarding the italicized text, he�s suffering form some mystery software glitch: they�re not supposed to be in italics.

Jumat, 12 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Autotune - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s poster from Chris Cummins (used with permission) is not about correcting pop stars who cannot sing on key. This was presented at the computer science conference HiPEAC 2016. Click to enlarge!


My first reaction when I opened the file was, �A magazine cover!� The title band, the big graphic central graphic surrounded by short bursts of copy all look like a magazine to me. The biggest visual clue was the �5X speedup!� circle is very reminiscent of the sort of thing you see on magazines all the time. You can see this on this MacUser cover:


I enjoy the overall appearance of the poster so much that the tweaks I might suggest are fairly small.

The red highlights in the text are dark and potentially difficult to read. While it doesn�t do it in this case, red on blue together can cause an effect called stereopsis:






I tried lightening the textual highlights (�expensive,� �automate,� �Omnitune� just a bit to match the red in the �5X� circle:


The difference is subtle, but the reds aren�t vanishing into the dark blue behind them quite as much as before.

There are at least four fonts in play on this poster, which is more than I normally recommend. It works, though, as the you often see a lot of play on fonts in magazine covers.

The subheadings seem to be set in Impact. I might have tried looking for a different font, because Impact has been used so much in recent years that it�s starting to look a bit tired. Worse, Impact is almost universally used in LOLcats and memes, so that font might signal silliness more than serious scholarship. On the other hand, memes do say �Internet and computers,� so that might not be a bad thing for a poster on computation.

Like last week�s poster, this one doesn�t treat authors equally. Instead, it emphasizes who is the presenting author in two ways. First, it uses colour. Not only is the presenting author�s name in a highlight colour (red), the other authors�s names are put in alight gray, rather than white. Second, it uses contact information to emphasize who you should send questions to: only the presenting author�s name gets an email address.


Like a good magazine cover, this poster is great at saying to conference goers, �Hey you! Yes you! Come across the hall and read me!� The potential problem is that in a magazine, you can flip into the covers to find more depth and details in the actual articles. A poster can�t provide that. It�s difficult for me to tell whether an aficionado has the key details that he or she would like.


Stereopsis slide from here.

Kamis, 04 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Gull movements - Si Bejo Science

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Today�s poster is courtesy of Christine Anderson. This was presented at last year�s World Seabird Conference. Spoiler alert: this poster contains seabirds. Click to enlarge!


Christine wrote that she was a blog reader, and posts like this and this inspired her.

Many things work on this poster. Neither the big, big title nor the picture of the gull can be missed. The picture being in a circle helps draw in the eye. The choice of colours, I think determined by the maps, is generally harmonious.

One of the unusual things about this poster is how it handles the author list. There are six authors, but the lead is quite a bit bigger than the others. I am guessing that Christine was the presenting author, and thus the only person at the poster during presentation time. This might have some advantages for the reader, as it allows you to identify who the presenter is quickly. On the other hand, having the presenting author�s name larger than those of the co-authors might be viewed as a downplaying of the contributions of the other authors.But then again, just the ordering of names does that.

This technique probably can�t work if the presenting author is not the first author. It would look dumb if the author list was:

Christine Anderson
Mark Mallory
Grant Gilchrist
Rob Ronconi
Chip Wesloh
Dan Clark

There are two things that might improve this poster.

First, almost everything could do with some more generous margins. The poster looks a little crowded. The Figure 1 legend looks like it�s just about set to bump into the latitude numbers on the neighbouring map.

Second, the recommendation for a little more spaciousness also applies to the text. The crowded feeling isn�t helped by the bullets. If you�re going to have bulleted lists, I like them set with hanging indents, like this:


I also added 6 points after each paragraph.

Christine wrote that the poster got a good reception, which I am always pleased to hear!

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