Latest modern science | Critique and makeover: Shrimp MoGs (rhymes with �rogues�) - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique and makeover: Shrimp MoGs (rhymes with �rogues�) - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Ladies and gentlemen, as hard as it may be to believe, I was not always the poster design guy you see before you now.

Rewind back to late 2007, when I was preparing a poster for the meeting of Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). I�ve hauled out the poster I made then because the paper has finally been published (Faulkes 2015).

This... is gonna hurt. Click to enlarge.

Oh boy.

Clearly I had not yet taken on board the lesson of editing. This was a problem in a lot of my old posters I made before I started this blog; see here and here in particular.

Yes, there�s even an abstract. The one thing I will say in my defense is that the instructions specifically said to include the abstract, and I was still a few years from realizing there are no poster police, and becoming an abstract anarchist as far as posters were concerned.

At the time, I was happy enough with this poster to have my picture taken with it. I can�t recall who I loaned my camera to, but I�m so grateful to him, because this is a favourite picture of me to this day. I felt like this picture showed my in my natural element.

My reaction to the poster now?

Not so much a critique as a cry of anguish.

Too much stuff and not enough space. I cringed when I looked at the guideline settings and saw the columns were only separated by half an inch. Nowhere near enough of a margin.

There were also a few blatant errors in the text that I never caught until now. No, I�m not going to tell you what they are. I shall leave that as an exercise for the reader, as they say.

I am happy that this poster is laid out in columns, with at least a major grid structuring the poster. I also learned something very important from doing this poster: rehearse the poster out loud. This is the poster that inspired this story:

For one poster I did, I had a figure that ended up in about column four, quite far to the right of the poster. (Black and white image at top of column four - ZF, 2015) I thought it made sense to put it there given the poster space. It felt fine when you read through the poster.

But when I gave people �tours� through the poster at the meeting, I kept referring to that picture very early on, when people were mostly examining stuff on the left side of the poster. People had to look way over to a different section of the poster, and it disrupted the flow of the presentation. (In that case, it was exacerbated by the poster being over two meters wide. People had to look a long way over to see the picture.)

Because this is one of my own posters, I was able to open up the original Publisher file and start editing. I didn�t give myself anything that I wouldn�t have had at the time, like new images. Here�s the revised version:

I made all the margins two inches. I hacked away a lot of the text, and replaced the stupid abstract with a picture of the study species, which people can more readily relate to and understand. That one key figure that threw off my narrative because it was too far over to the right got moved up to the introduction, too.

It�s better, but honestly, I can see this version is still struggling with the baggage from the first effort. I�m not sure those three tables are helping my cause. And there is still too much text. But I am not going to redo the poster from scratch because I have better things to do than completely remake a poster from a conference more than seven year ago. (But apparently I don�t have better things to do than write a blog post about it.)

If I were to design the poster again from scratch today, it might be a lot more like these graphics that I made to promote the paper on Twitter. None of these graphics could be a poster as is, but they give an idea of the approach I took in making a compact version of the paper.

The one above has the picture of the shrimp, which is nice, but it needs more detail for the results. Remember, the point of this is not to be complete, but as an enticement to get people to click a link to a longer article.

This next one below is probably closest to a working poster:

Nice, simple, straight head to head comparison between to species. Put in a title, a picture of the animals, and this is close to something you could hang up on the conference poster board.

This last one has a clear title and some more detail:

I worry that it has a little too much detail, but that central panel really drives home the difference between what was expected (two separate cell bodies on the side) and what I saw (massive, hard to tell apart cell bodies in the middle).

As much as it hurts to go back into your old work, it is nice to go back and see how far you�ve come.

References

Faulkes Z. 2007. Motor neurons involved in escape responses in white shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus. Integrative and Comparative Biology 47(Supplement 1): e178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icm105

Faulkes Z. 2015. Motor neurons in the escape response circuit of white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). PeerJ 3: e1112. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1112

Related posts

Critique: Crustacean nociception
Should your first presentation be a poster?
The one inch rule
Scripting a poster
Abstract abolition

External links

The most beautiful thing I�ve made in science
Shrimp FFMN FAC: social media exclusive!

Latest modern science | Critique and makeover: Fine lace - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique and makeover: Fine lace - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Melissa WilsonSayres found this poster at this year�s Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference:

Yes, that�s a bra in the background. The authors made their poster into a boob joke.

The reaction to this on Twitter was not positive. Comments ranged from �shocked� to �mind boggling� to �poor choices all around� to �what where they thinking� to �speechless� to �great way to get people to miss the point of your poster.�

Okay. There is much to discuss here, and I�m not sure I�ll get to it all. There are a lot of things to talk about, I know, with everyday sexism and gender roles and appropriate behaviour in a professional setting and more.

I�m not one to talk about this. I am not about to cast the first stone on using knickers in design. I did, after all, write an entire post about lessons from lingerie. But this poster... that wasn�t what I meant.

Putting aside all that, this is a poorly designed poster, both conceptually and graphically. Let�s go back to a basic principle:

The design of a conference poster should be in the service of what the audience wants to know. Here, the design is in the service of a joke. And the joke doesn�t make any point about the scientific content.

For instance, Andrea Kirkwood noted:

The background is overemphasized to the detriment of the data.

Bad at Being Human had the most memorable critique:

The combination of the title style and the background comes across as the textual form of motorboarding.

I completely agree with this. It�s not just that there�s a bra as a background image, but the authors squeeze the title down into the cleavage to emphasize the breasts.

It�s not just the bra that�s the problem, either. There is a lot of room to improve in almost every aspect of the poster. Roberto Marquez added:

Plus 3D plots (why does anyone even consider...?)

The title is well below eye level, and will be blocked by anyone standing in front of the poster.

The typefaces seem to be chosen to be �feminine,� but they are hard to read. I cannot make out the text of the introduction in the photo, for example, even at the highest magnification. The swishy text might have made for a good heading, but is a horrible choice for the majority of the text.

Here�s what I would have done.

When I do poster makeover, I try to not to destroy the spirit of what the authors wanted. The title indicates that wanted something a little sexy. I am not opposed to making something sexy. Appealing to our sexual side can be a powerful way to communicate, if you can get past the inherent craziness and irrationality that comes along with sex appeal. See the �four organs of communication� in some of Randy Olson�s writing (summarized here).

In search of sexy, the authors went with the bra image. The problem is that the imagery they used is too literal and in your face. It violate the Sommese rule and treats the audience like morons.

I�ve talked before about the power of pastiche: imitating something that is a proven and recognizable template. You want to evoke lacy bras? Pick a well known and recognizable brand that one associates with lacy underthings.

I would go look at a Victoria�s Secret catalogue. (Purely for research!)

I�d look at the type used in the Victoria�s Secret logo and in the main pages. Bell MT is close to their main logo. I also notice that they use a mix of small caps and italics in their display text. Victoria�s Secret sometimes use a grotesque sans serif that I can�t identify. I tried a Franklin Gothic as a substitute.

I�d take a few representative pages from the catalogue to figure out what the colour palette might be. It would probably be pinks, pastel blue, creamy or pearly off-whites.

My version of this poster might be more like this (click to enlarge):

The key element is the lace of the title. The lace is now a very light, subtle pattern in the background. I took a large image of lace, and used the corrections in Microsoft Publisher to adjust the lightness and recolour it. To reinforce the lace theme, I kept something the authors had in their original poster: a little bow, which I put at the bottom instead of the side.

This is just my first draft, and certainly isn�t the only or best way to do it. The makeover shows that colour, type, and patterns alone can evoke a little bit of the sexiness implied by the title.

Latest modern science | Critique: Galaxy quest - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique: Galaxy quest - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

This week�s poster comes from Chelsea Sharon, and is shown with her kind permission. Click to enlarge!

Chelsea writes:

I feel like hardly anyone ever has useful design critiques for me, and I�ve certainly settled into a specific template.

I would try to calm down some of the type in the title and headings by removing outlines and underline. The title is particularly busy, with the title and the authors� names and the authors� institutions each getting a different combination of colour and outline: red with white outline, white with blue outline, blue with white outline. The outline of the authors� names is making those two lines come perilously close together, touching in several places:

While the photo is reasonably subdued, it contributes to the overall feel of clutter. 

I�m not a fan of author photos on posters, but this one could be incorporated more smoothly. The picture breaks the symmetry of the title, and again contributes to the crowded feel. If you�re going to have a non-symmetrical layout, own it, by not centering the text. My revision might look something like this:

(You�ll have to image the background image of the radio telescope array.)

One other little point in the title bar is that Fabian
Walter�s name gets broken across two lines (as I have imitated in this paragraph). Where to put line breaks in text can be a tricky business, but it�s probably best not to break up an author�s first and last names if possible.

Travelling down to the main body of the poster, the underline on the headings could be removed.

The bullets are not bringing anything to the table. Bullets are effective for calling out short lists in larger blocks of text. Here, they fall victim to the Syndrome syndrome:

The amount of text is intimidating, and makes me wonder if some cutthroat editing might be in order.

Having most of the the main text all in the center of the poster helps provide a thread for the reader to follow through. Having the figures on the sides of that central column meas the reader has to weave back and forth between the text and the figures, but it isn�t too confusing. Maybe there could be few signals to link the text and the figure: some emphasis with bolding, and perhaps even a hint of colour?

Finally, those big heavy blue lines separating each block? Let�s see what happens if we remove those:

The poster seems to hold up fine without them.

Related posts

Mug shot

External links

Run ragged

Latest modern science | Critique: Shape perception - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique: Shape perception - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 11.22 Add Comment

Today�s contribution comes from Arvid Herwig, and is shown with his permission. Click to enlarge!

My first reaction to this poster was incredibly positive. It�s an interesting mix of the bold and the restrained. The dark red bands surrounding each section are very large and visually dominant. Yet there are so few of them, and they are placed so precisely, that they don�t feel overwhelming. The muted background also helps calm the overall design.

To give an idea of how important those colour choices are, here�s a quick and dirty replacement of the brick red of the lines with a straight red, and the light gray grid with straight white:

Suddenly, the warmth is gone and you have a look that has all the appeal of a traffic sign.

The logos are corralled down in the corners, making them unobtrusive.

I�m impressed by how well the images and text fit within the section borders. Circles and triangles are not easy shapes to fit text or graphs into, but there is little wasted space here. The text and images follow the contours of the shapes very nicely.

The one problem I had was when I started to read it. I immediately read it the wrong way. I went from 1 across to 3, instead of from 1 down to 2. It seems that a major challenge for this poster is how to signal that it should be read in columns, not rows.

The first cue,spacing of the sections, tries to guide me. Section 1 and 2 are closer to each other than 1 and 3.

Part of the problem may be the labelling. The callout for �01 Introduction� is about the same distance, or maybe even a little closer, to �03 Methods� as it is to �02 Objective�.

Second, the labels for 01 and 03 point in the same direction. This provides a subtle cue that the two sections may be related to each other. I tried this alternate, making the headings for the first two sections match, attempting to strengthen the link between those two.

While I�m not sure this makeover works yet, I think the theory is sound. If you can get the reader to go down in the first instance, the rest falls into place.

Overall, some quite lovely work here.

Latest modern science | Critique: Many-body dispersion - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique: Many-body dispersion - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

This week�s poster comes from Jan Hermann, and is used with permission. Click to enlarge:

This is quite lovely. Everything is aligned. The text boxes are not enclosed in heavy lines. The colours are attractive and subdued. Even the institutional logo is done in a way that doesn�t detract from the rest of the poster.

There�s just one thing that I have mixed feelings about: that big �Summary & outlook� box.

There are several visual cues that this bit is important. The box is placed right in the middle. Its dark brown background contrasts with the much lighter background surrounding it. This is a well known trick for drawing attention. Look at this example (from here).

The summary box is like the Volkswagon in the ad above: it�s hard not to be drawn to it first. In some ways, this is good. Because it is a summary, you want people to be drawn back to that point.

There are some down sides to this. The summary box breaks the expected reading flow. You tend to look at the summary first, which is good. It�s not too hard to figure out where to go next: upper left corner. So far, so good.

Where the summary box loses some of its appeal is when I�m making my way back though the results. It creates a break. Two related text sections are forced far apart:

When I hit the left text box highlighted in the image above, the next thing I expect to look at, based of its place in the poster, is the top figure (1).

But the position of the graphs is not closely related to their references in the text. The call to examine Figure 1 is closer to Figure 2, and Figure 2 appears in the reading order before you reach the reference to it.

Thus, I have to do a bit of work to connect that text box split across two columns, because of that summary box in the middle. It�s certainly not a fatal flaw. The benefits of that strong summary may outweigh the inconvenience of trying to work out the reading order.

Latest modern science | Critique: The final four - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique: The final four - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

It�s long past March, but poster design knows no season! This week�s poster comes from author Cameron Fuqua, and is used with permission. Click to enlarge!

In a reversal of the norm, the tables � usually one of the things I like least on a poster � are one of the best things on this one. The tables avoid the �data prison� problem: that is, too many lines encasing each cell. The colour banding to distinguish rows is subtle. The gradient fills provide a little emphasis for each cell, but are not distracting. The silver gradient fills for the text boxes are also well done, providing some visual interest that is not distracting.

I wish that aesthetic extended to the rest of the poster.

The rest of the poster is confined within thick, heavy-lined boxes. The poster would probably be significantly improved by thinning or removing the lines entirely.

Worse, they�re boxes with rounded corners. The rounded corners brings the lines of the box closer to the text, which is already a problem. There is no space between the text and the lines, particularly in the upper left boxes. Further, the rounding isn�t consistent. Some corners are quite curved, others are closer to right angles.

I like distinctive typefaces for titles and section headings, but this one (something in the Eurostile family, I think) sacrifices too much legibility for decoration. From a distance, common letters like �a� and �e� are hard to tell apart. There is some variation in the heading weight: some things are in bold (which is contributing to making the letters hard to read), some not.

Underlining is used for emphasis, which also make it more difficult to read the text.

Throughout the poster, there are dozens of cases with things being poorly aligned or placed. Some of the mathematical equations have a space surplus on one side or another.

Finally, predicting the outcome of a competition is something that many people should be able to understand and relate to, regardless of the complexities of the mathematical equations behind the predictions. I�m surprised that when I look down in the lower right, where I expect to see an answer to the question, �Can I use this method to get a better bracket?�, I can�t see any answer. I would love a single sentence like, �This new model�s performance is better / as good as / worse than previous ones.�

Latest modern science | Variations on a theme: crayfish nociception - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Variations on a theme: crayfish nociception - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Back in 2010, I had just co-authored a paper on crustacean nociception with Sakshi Puri. At the time, we had already started the follow-up experiments that have just been published.

Now there was a bit of a gap between the two papers, which means that this research was presented at quite a few conferences. Six of them, all told. Click on any to enlarge!

The first poster in the series was for the International Association of Astacology in 2010. This one shows how many of the experiments that made it into the 2015 paper were already in the can (to borrow an old movie making phrase) back in 2010!

Graphically, the red used in the central graph in the middle was picked up from the colour of the crayfish in the pot on the upper right. The greens used in the headings were picked up with an eyedropper from the colour of the wasabi.

While the crayfish boil provided a nice illustration of the question that initially motivated these experiments, it�s hard to make out that they are crayfish from a distance. The rest of the posters have big pictures of individual crayfish, or their close relatives, lobsters.

Later that same summer, I attended the Ninth International Congress of Neuroethology in Spain. This one is different from the others for two reasons:

1. It was the only one in portrait format (and a fairly small total size, too). I�ve heard fairly consistently that posters for European conferences are portrait more often than North American conferences.
2. It was made in PosterGenius (reviewed here) rather than Microsoft Publisher.

I switched from the picture from a shot of many crayfish in a pot to a single lobster in a pot. As a result, the colour palette for this poster completely changed. The lobster is greys and blues, so the graph and headings are those colours, too.

Making this in Poster Genius was a challenge, because I recall it being difficult to adjust the size of the text. I couldn�t use my usual trick of making the text for the references smaller, so I struggled greatly to make everything fit. As a result, this poster came out rather text heavy.

The following summer,  in 2011, I went to The Crustacean Society meeting. We had done more experiments over the year, and this was the first appearance of the behavioural responses to high temperature stimuli. Video gives a much better sense of the behaviour than any graph, so this was an early appearance of a QR code that people could scan to watch the video. I don�t recall many people using it.

This was also the first appearance of the title that my co-author, Sakshi Puri, wanted our paper to have, and which ultimately became the title of the paper. When we started the experiments, I�d joked with her that I�d wanted it to be, �Do crayfish like spicy food?�

I also think Sakshi asked for us to set the poster in Time New Roman rather than sans serifs.

I think of all the posters, this one is, in some ways, the least successful. There was a lot of space at the bottom that are filled with pictures that could go anywhere. And the spacing between the habanero and wasabi pictures is a little too wide. The colours used for the spikes are a little bright.

I was pleased to have found a lovely crayfish picture from Michael Bok that appears on several later posters. 

In fall of that year, we took this project to �the big show�: the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2011. (Sakshi blogged about her experience here.)

This paper is a little reminiscent of the first one in this series, in that it uses a lot of red for graphs and headings. The heading here was a font called Orial that has some nice detailing, although in retrospect, it was a little too subtle for people to notice.

People scanned the QR code a lot, according to Sakshi.

This meeting was important, because another poster at that meeting had a technique for studying responses to low temperatures, using dry ice. We did that experiment soon after, and it made it onto the next iteration of the poster.

In 2012, I presented at the Tenth International Congress for Neuroethology.

I was proud of the use of the two callout boxes in this one. I thought the light red backgrounds were sufficiently different to signal that these were not part of the main narrative, but subtle enough not to be distracting.

I did away with headings, using drop caps as another way to signal sections.

While the QR code still appears with a link to a video of the behaviour, that was purely a backup. Most of the time, the code was covered by my new iPad that I stapled to the spot. I carefully designed the code and the text so that it would not be seen when the iPad was on top of it. This meant that much of the poster was designed around how big my iPad was! The width of the iPad helped determine the column width, and therefore how many columns the poster would get.

One of the big sticking points in publishing the paper was trying to get neurophysiological records from the claw, which are shown on this poster. These didn�t make it into the final paper. Ultimately, that proved too hard to get good recordings, so we went back to using the antennae, which we�d used in our 2010 paper.

The final version of the poster appeared at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in early 2014.

I was happy with the picture I found as the entry point. I love the expression on the woman�s face, and it perfectly reflects why people are always asking about, �Are lobsters / crayfish / crabs / shrimp hurt when they�re cooked?�

Again, there are reds in the graphs throughout, because of the colours in the animals and the Nature article screen grabs.

While I often rail against boxes, I tried them here. I think they work because rather than putting a box around each individual part, I used the boxes as column separators. I�d seen this done occasionally in magazine and newspaper layouts. I went for extremely light lines (they look finer on the poster than in the image here).

When seen all at once, in this small format, several of them look a bit busy because of the physiology recordings. They often look very busy, and they use a lot of colours. The last two posters perhaps fare a little better because they don�t have those complex charts.

In looking at these again, I am pleased to see what I think might be some progress. The last two are, I think, a little more successful than the earlier ones. After all, for the first ones, I�d only been blogging about poster design for about a year. By the time I did that last one, this blog was closer to five years old.

Do you have a favourite?

Related posts

Small conference, big conference
iPoster

References


Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2015. Can crayfish take the heat? Procambarus clarkii show nociceptive behaviour to high temperature stimuli, but not low temperature or chemical stimuli. Biology Open: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/bio.20149654

Latest modern science | Critique: Build a better turbine - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique: Build a better turbine - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Today�s award-winning poster is courtesy of reader Jennifer Rinker. It was presented at the CU Energy Frontiers conference, where Jennifer walked away with the win in the �Electricity Generation and Storage Category.� Click to enlarge!

Jennifer writes:

At one point I was chatting with one of the judges briefly, and he enthusiastically told me I was getting full points for clarity.

I can see why. This is very clear.

The clarity is even more impressive because the poster uses a slightly unconventional layout: two horizontal sections, subdivided by vertical columns. While removing lines is often one of the first things I do to improve a poster (see below), the horizontal line here provides a clear cue of how to read the poster. It also serves the role of �grounding� the figure of the turbine, so it isn�t floating in space.

Because this poster has such a light touch � ample spacing, subdued colours, fine lines � the table near the center surprised me a bit. The table is emphasized in three ways:

1. It�s printed in large, thick letters;
2. Against a darker background, and;
3. Inside a box.  

Any two of those are probably enough to highlight the table. I tried taking away the lines of the box:

The table harmonizes with the rest of the poster much better without the box. I�d perhaps increase the contrast between the table�s background and the background of the rest of the poster.


Cream and off-white colours are very attractive for posters, perhaps because they mimic the look of printed pages in books, which are rarely perfectly white. I would be tempted to go just a hair lighter in case this poster was someplace the lighting was bad. I tried a quick and dirty colour replacement. This wipes out some of the fine lines, alas:

I�m also pleased to report that this blog � and, more importantly, the many people who have shared their over the years � had a small part in this poster. Jennifer wrote:

I designed it based on a lot of your critiques and comments on poster blog. ... I was inspired by some of the really fantastic posters on your blog.

All part of the service!

Latest modern science | Critiques: Icy bodies - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critiques: Icy bodies - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Today's poster is from Terik Daly, and was presented at the last Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. As always, click to enlarge! Enlarging always helps, but this one is particularly enhanced by increasing the size a bit.

My first thought was, �This is going to be a short critique.� That this was a crisp and professional design leaped out right away.

This poster makes excellent use of a grid, with plenty of space between elements.

The typeface is either FF Din, or something very near to it. FF Din is a typeface that is used quite often by professional designers, but almost never by scientists, because... it�s not a standard font in Microsoft Windows. The Din fonts were originally designed for railroad signs, so they have the advantage of being legible from a distance, and are quite compact, too, which is a nice combination for a poster.

While my dislike of logos in titles is well documented, Terik does it right here.The logo is occupying a space that would otherwise by empty, so it is not chewing up any valuable poster real estate. The logo is transparent, leaving no identifiable �box� fingerprint around it. The logo sits comfortably in the poster, rather than fighting for space on it.

I like the idea of having the short summary below the authors� byline. The problem here might be that the summary is a little too similar to the title bar above it. It might benefit from being a different colour, or something to make the text �pop� to let readers quickly identify this as the main text, not the sort of mostly minor details you normally find under the authors� names (institutional affiliation and the like).

The only thing that is a genuine error, in my view, is in the top central graph, where one of the data labels crosses the X axis. The label just needs a slight nudge upward, and it would be more readable and attractive without sacrificing any clarity of which line it�s associated with.

The poster is a little drab right around eye level: it�s black and blue text right across the board where my eyes will glance first, under the title bar.

I like images on posters, and would like to see the pictures here play a more prominent role on the poster. Unlike some posters, I don�t know what I would change on this one to make that happen. There always is another way, naturally, but in this case, it would probably demand a wholescale editing and reworking of the text. The overall layout is so clear that I�m hard pressed to imagine this poster in any other way.

External links

FF Din

Latest modern science | Critique: Inexhaustible sediment - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Critique: Inexhaustible sediment - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 14.43 Add Comment

Today�s poster comes from Sokratis Papaspyrou. As always, click to get a closer look!

Sokratis notes:

It was designed and made in two days... could be better (always). I used a colour wheel  to select the colours and made use of the �circle draws attention� trick I read in a book and also read in one of your posts.

Sokartis�s deliberate consideration of the use of colours and circles both pay off. Both features work very well. I would have tried making the position of the �callout� circles more consistent. The two left circles just don�t agree on a pattern.

There could be two ways to achieve this. Either you could place them all in the upper right corner:

Or, you could place them all by the margins:

I slightly favour the third of these, but the difference is minor.

The other thing that you might see in my mock-ups above is that I tried to make the blue boxes the same width as the others in the column.

While I�ve stated before that a reader should be able to follow the reading order of a poster without arrows, I don�t mind their use here. I think it�s because apart from the very first transition from the �Premise,� you�re simply moving down the page. The brush strokes used for the arrow bring an nice organic touch.

The only other small thing that comes to mind is to remove the underlining from the headings and author list.

Finally, this poster benefits from simplicity. It has very little text. It has clear highlights in the circles to help browsers through the poster quickly.

Related posts

The eye loves the circle
Don�t hold my hand
Undo the underline

Latest modern science | Better Posters on the road: The MEOPAR workshop - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Better Posters on the road: The MEOPAR workshop - Si Bejo Science

critiques

Unknown 14.46 Add Comment

I spent the first part of last week in beautiful Qu�bec City giving a poster workshop for MEOPAR. I�d given presentations about making posters before, but this was the first time I�d tried to turn this into a half a day workshop, which was intimidating. The participants (dubbed �Meopeers�) were good sports about it all.

One of the things that made the job easier was that several of the Meopeers brought posters with them. As it happened, between the five there was a good mix of different features to talk about. These five posters gave me the chance to talk about logos, abstracts, eye levels, reading order, entry points, and much more.

This first was one of the cleanest, simplest posters. I would have put the right picture above the text, not below it, to bring the great picture closer to eye level. I also might have tried paragraphs instead of bullet points.

This second poster has a clean three column layout, but the amount of text is truly intimidating. The introduction � the whole right column, if we�re honest � is not welcoming to a casual passerby.

The poster above got caught in a lighting �dead zone" much of the first day. There were lights on to the right of it, to the left of it, but not above it, and it was noticeably dark. Compare the lighting of the middle poster to the two flanking it. 

 
This demonstrated that posters are not always displayed in good lighting conditions, and lots of conference poster sessions are in hotels like this one.

On poster number three, there are a few unnecessary boxes around the columns of this one. The logos here throw off the nice centering of the title, so I suggested left aligning the title and leaving the logos where they are.

The colours of the graphics are all over the map. This is a situation where I don�t know if the colours can be harmonized while keeping the scientific content intact, however.

This fourth one tries to provide skimming readers with a quick entry point, with a box that reads �Goal� in the upper right corner. The box is a bit dark and hard to read, though. Points for concept, but penalties for execution.

 
A couple of other issues here are that all the graphics are corralled at the bottom, and are rather small. The reading order switches around, with the central two columns reading across then down, instead of down, then across.

This fifth poster had the best title bar of all of the posters. The picture of the ferry is an excellent entry point, the title is big and clear and not crowded, and the logo is appropriately low key, tucked away in the lower right of the title bar.

Then, the bottom falls apart. The left column is okay, but... that right hand side. Oh dear. As soon as you hit the Methods and Results, you�re awash in a sea of small, intense graphs. Even after two straight days of looking at this poster on and off, I still haven�t been able to which way I am supposed to read the figures without going in and studying each one in detail, like these Meopeers were doing:

Some of the points that came up in discussion was the difference between the intended order of information, and how people actually looked at the poster. Even the first three posters, with a clear three column order, were not often read in that order.

Several Meopeers admitted to being �skimmers,� looking at the start and finish of the poster for the main points, and not bothering with with the stuff in the middle at all.

There was some contention about the use of logos. One participant said, �My university will insist that they be there.� I am still baffled by how an institution can stop you from doing whatever you want with a poster. Even then, like everything else, there are some ways to include logos that are better than others.

I thank all the Meopeers for their willingness to listen. I thank the MEOPAR coordinating team for inviting me back home to Canada (first time home in seven years) and being most excellent hosts. I hope it helped!

Latest modern science | In search of simplicity, plus a makeover - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | In search of simplicity, plus a makeover - Si Bejo Science

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In a blog post on The Conversation, Jordan Gaines Lewis extols the virtues of simplicity, both as a viewer and presenter:

Also, forget the wordy background information, paragraphs and long conclusions � when I look at your research poster, I�m only looking at the title and figures. ...

Nowadays, when I design posters or oral presentations, I aim to do the same thing regardless of whether I�m introducing my work to scientists or non-scientists. My research posters, in fact, are almost laughably simple. Well under 200 words, with large, blocky figures, at first glance they may resemble a high school science project � certainly not a typical graduate student�s work at an international conference.

But the human brain is attracted to simplicity. Since applying what I�ve learned from being a science communicator, my conference poster experience has completely changed. I�m frequently bombarded by a non-stop stream of scientists from all different fields, never having more than a free minute or two to sneak a swig of water. The best part is that because they understand what�s on the paper, our discussions can go deeper.

I was struck by Jordan�s description, and asked if we could see an example of her work. She was kind enough to send one of her examples. Click to enlarge!

Jordan�s poster is indeed simple: this poster has one result. It succeeds in that anyone looking at it will think they can get the main messages of the poster in a few minutes.

I asked Jordan to talk about this poster, and I was delighted she replied with much more than I could have reasonably expected:

A few years ago, when my first scientific conference was around the corner, I couldn�t wait to make a poster. I was awed by those with complex titles, long-winded methods, and tons of detailed graphs. To me, this style reeked of intelligence, complexity, and months of hard work. I wanted to show off, too.

�until I went to my first scientific conference, and I found myself avoiding these types of posters like the plague.

We humans like simple things. And especially in a hall filled with hundreds of posters (and ten times that many people milling about), our eyes want to focus on the least chaotic item in the room and find comfort there.

My style of designing posters changed dramatically after I participated in Penn State�s Graduate Exhibition last year�a school-wide celebration of graduate work in all disciplines, from theoretical physics to visual arts. Our posters are judged by professors, students, alumni, and volunteers from the Penn State community who come from all different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Our work must appeal to (and be understandable by) everybody.

Distilling a year�s worth of work into an easy-to-understand poster was not a cakewalk. Eventually, I settled on a single figure, a flow chart to visualize my methods, and an image to complement my background information. The text was large and the colors were simple.

As I spoke, I found it easy to carry my judge along the way while pointing out images and figures. This experience was a revelation to me: the poster is not the centerpiece. Rather, it�s the accessory to the story that comes out of the expert�s mouth.

Despite this positive experience, I was a bit nervous to re-use this simple poster a few months later at an international conference specific to my field of study. As I hung it up in the morning, it looked laughably simple next to the surrounding posters.

But when the poster session time rolled around, attendees were drawn to mine like flies to honey. To me, the best part was that since the methodology and results were so clear from the poster, I didn�t have to waste our time by answering clarification-type questions. Instead, our conversations could go deeper�about further experiments, implications for the work, and how my findings relate to the field at large.

The goal of your poster is to inform, not impress. Teach, not overwhelm. It�s harder to cut down words than it is to copy/paste from the Methods section of your latest publication.

Poster-making is truly an art form�some people are naturals, and others need assistance even after decades of presenting their work. I�ve still got a lot of learning to do myself, and I can�t wait to prepare for my next scientific conference.

Allot yourself a bit of extra time to design your next poster. Have a layperson take a look over it before you print it. Give simplicity a try. I have a feeling you�ll find yourself having more quality discussions with more scientists at your next meeting.

Because I am a tinkerer, though, I thought I would see if there were some things that might make things even better. Jordan described her style as �blocky,� so I start, as I often do, by removing boxes, first around the main text blocks:

Then I pulled out the boxes around the inner images:

Then I went in and tried to harmonize the text, by making a little more room around it, and making the sizes more consistent. I also removed the white fill in some text boxes to allow the pale blue background to come through.

Then a few more text changes, notably to the title. And I got rid of that last box in the figure legend.