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Kamis, 20 Agustus 2015

Latest modern science | Critique: Rein it in - Si Bejo Science

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Opening up reader submissions for this blog is interesting. Sometimes, I make an audible sound when I first see the poster. Sort of a sharp intake of breath. Not quite a gasp. The sot of noise you make in the passenger seat and you see a car coming towards you and you�re not sure if the driver has seen it and you can�t hit the brakes or steer?

Maybe not quite that bad, but... it�s not a good sound.

Then there are times when you open up the file, and think, �Well, dang, am I going to have anything to write about that?�

Today�s contribution is more in the latter category than the first. It comes from Sourav Chakraborty, who gave me the okay to show this to you. Click to enlarge!


Sourav was inspired by a poster by Josefine K�hberger on this very blog, in fact. The result is a nice, clean, attractive poster. There is not a huge amount of text. The layout is clear. The base colours are subdued neutral shades (which I think is one of the main influences from Josefine�s poster), with brighter colours used to good effect for emphasis and highlighting, particularly in the code.

This poster uses bulleted lists, which I generally don�t like. Let�s have a closer look:


This list might be improved by creating a stronger and more distinct hierarchy between the different levels. The main bullets are black squares, and the secondary bullets are black circles.

It�s good that the two levels have different shapes and sizes, but the differences are not that big. I might try reducing the point size Particularly from a distance (or when reduced in size on the screen), the squares and circles look pretty similar. If you�re going to use different levels of lists, you want to make it clear that they are different.

Here�s a quick change to make them more distinct: a hollow circle instead of a filled one.


The difference alone is not enough: you also want to make sure that the differences work in the right direction following expectations of hierarchy. Here�s an example, where I create the same difference (hollowing a symbol), but the other way around:


Lightening the squares works against viewer�s expectations. You�ve made something important lower contrast, making is less noticeable, signalling that it is less important, not more. But the position says it�s more important, not less.

Here�s one more revision where I shrunk the secondary bullets to about 80% of the original, again to create a bigger difference between the different levels of text hierarchy.


Now it�s clearer which are the main points, and which are the secondary points.

Egalitarianism is great socially, but it�s not so great in text design.

Related posts

Bullets versus sentences

Kamis, 13 Agustus 2015

Latest modern science | A poster with no conference, or: What I made in that #SciFund poster class - Si Bejo Science

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A couple of months back, I was one of the instructors in the #SciFund poster making class. We had decided to require everyone make their posters in Adobe Illustrator, which I have never used before. This freaked me out a little bit, and I knew that if I was going to be useful to students, I would have to figure out Illustrator myself.

I decided that I had to make a poster at the same time the students were. I just had one problem: I wasn�t going to a conference this summer, so I had no actual need to make a poster. I decided to tackle the data on a paper that was going through the editorial process at the time, and was finally released today (Faulkes 2015).

I wasn�t extraordinarily diligent in documenting my process, but I did try. This first one is fairly early in the process (click to enlarge):


What surprises me in retrospect is that from a distance, this first one is very similar to what I ended up with. The basic layout decisions � five columns, three pictures in the middle � served me pretty well. But you could not hang in a conference. Obviously, pictures are missing, and if you click to enlarge, you will see a lot of silly placeholder text (from a variety of sources).

Despite that I normally tell people they don�t need logos, I included one mainly because it looked like I would had space left over. This was a simple way to fill it, and the colours matched the picture.

A few steps later, and the poster already looks very close to done. But as we�ll see, looks can be deceiving.


First, I ditched the standard �IMRAD� headings. My idea was to try to make the poster quickly readable by making every heading a key question or finding. That way, you only had to read a few sentences to get the gist of the poster.

Second, I pulled in colour. It just happened that the pictures I found tended to have green and orange in them, which, coincidentally enough, was the colour scheme for the new University of Texas Rio Grande Valley mascot. I used the eyedropper to duplicate colours from the mascot and photos to the headings, the box around the pictures, the title, and so on.

Third, I put in the data. I considered making graphs, but I kept thinking that these were simple, easy to understand numbers, and there were not very many of them. The central graphic is, in essence, the thing I tell people to never put on a poster: a table! But it�s a table with photos, lots of space, and no �data prison.�

Fast forward a few more steps:


The obvious change when you see the thumbnail is that I�ve moved the mascot. I placed the mascot in the lower right corner following the Cosmo principle: that�s where the least important stuff goes. The problem was that the Vaquero was facing outwards, leading your eyes off the poster. I moved it one column over, just because I didn�t want to move it very far.

But that wasn�t far enough!


Now the mascot is clearly facing into the poster, leading your eye into the next section of text. Much better.

You can�t see at a glance are all the changes to the text I�m making as I go, too. But trust me, there is a lot of editing and rewriting going on.

This is the final version:


I know it doesn�t look all that much different from the second image above, but there are so many chances that you can�t see in the thumbnail. They are the little things like increasing the text size, changes in wording, and the space between the lines. They are almost subliminal differences, but they all add up to a much nicer appearance, as I wrote about here.

One of the last changes was which numbers I used in the central graphic. I rounded the percentages up to got rid of the decimals. They just weren�t necessary. I also changed which numbers I showed in the second row, which much more clearly indicated the popularity of one species (almost half of all sales!).

The decision about which numbers to show on this poster, in fact, led to me asking the editors to make some last minute changes in the published paper. Because I was forced to grapple how to show things clearly and visually on a poster that I realized there were some nice improvements I could make to the paper.

I�ve given just a few examples of the stages in making this poster in this post, but you can watch the development with more steps in this video:


Related posts

Look into the poster: gaze and graphics
#SciFund poster class links
The last 10% of the poster should take more than 10% of your time

External link

A clone and two dwarfs

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2015. Marmorkrebs (Procambarus fallax f. virginalis) are the most popular crayfish in the North American pet trade. Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems 416: 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/kmae/2015016

Kamis, 06 Agustus 2015

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

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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!

Senin, 03 Agustus 2015

Latest modern science | Archiving posters - Si Bejo Science

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I�ve talked before about the long waits in getting projects published. But sometimes, despite waiting, projects never make it past the conference poster stage. I�ve also talked about developing a gut instinct for whether something is publishable.

It�s nice that now, there are ways to turn ephemera into an archival, potentially usable and citable, document. For a while, I�ve been meaning to start putting up some of my posters into FigShare, which I�ve been of fan of from early on. I first used it when I published a paper here on my blog. Since then, I�ve used it to archive the raw data for several of my papers as unofficial supplemental information.

The first one to go up is a poster I presented at the third International Tunicate Conference in 2005 at the University of California Santa Barbara.

This one is one of the relatively few projects that we were never able to push out into a paper. I still think it makes for a pretty good poster, though.

Archiving this poster got me thinking. I see clear value in archiving old posters that can document projects that never made it into the scientific literature. But is there value in archiving posters that were the early versions of projects that did make it into the regular scientific literature? I can see old posters have some interest as examples of design (see the Better Posters blog). They might eventually have some historical interest.

But is there any scientific interest in archiving old posters? Posters are generally works in progress, so tend to be incomplete and preliminary. Might they actually confuse matters by including dead end ideas that were abandoned by the authors?

Reference

Stwora A, Scofield VL, Faulkes Z. 2015. Effects of oxidative stress on Ascidia interrupta embryogenesis. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1499282

Crossposted from NeuroDojo.

Kamis, 30 Juli 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for July 2015 - Si Bejo Science

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This month�s must read is from Bethany Brookshire, a.k.a. the mighty Scicurious, who has been baking cookies for science. She is at the point where she is making posters showing the results of her experiment.


Her article is aimed at people who are still in school, but is worth reading even if you haven�t used glue sticks in a while. For instance, Bethany writes:
What makes a good poster stand out is one having what I call the three C�s.

  • Continuity: The poster should present a continuous story of your experiment. ...
  • Clarity: When you share your research with others, you want to make sure that what you did is clear. ...
  • Consistency: The style of a poster should be consistent to help the poster look clear.

Today�s lesson in why the spacebar was invented: to prevent the University of Florida art education department from embarrassing itself (hat tip to Jeff):


Default QR codes are kind of ugly. But here�s a way to make them more interesting. You can upload a small, high contrast image, and incorporate that into the code at this website. Fer instance, I took this UTRGV institutional logo:


And turned it into this QR code that links to the university home page.


If you squint a bit, you can kind of make out the shape of Texas! I could probably do better if I made a black and white image. Hat tip to Dustin Mayfield Jones.

While everyone is abuzz with the gorgeous images of the Pluto flyby, take a look at how the first television image of Mars was made fifty years ago this week. It�s a story of impatience and a lot of crayons. (Okay, pastels.) It�s a fascinating story of turning data into an image. Hat tip to many, including Sarcastic Rover.



�How big should the text be?� is a persistent, but not readily answered, question of poster designers. But there is a particular kind of poster where text size and visibility has to be rigorously assessed: eye charts. This article is an in-depth look at how eye charts were designed and have changed over time. Hat tip to Mocost.



Here�s one for conference organizers: how to make your meeting accessible to people who are ill or have long term disabilities. Another contribution: make sure chairs are available somewhere for the poster session for people who have trouble standing for long periods.

Album covers become iconic images. Album covers were some of the first things I thought about in design terms. One of my favourite cover designers was Malcolm Garrett, whose name appeared on records by many early 80s UK bands. Songwriter and business woman Little Boots talks about the creation of her latest album cover:


The more you learn about design, the more good descriptions of process become invaluable.

Follow this Twitter thread for some interesting comments on what people look for in a poster.

And I�m going to leave Andrew Farke with the last word this month:

All together now: Posters are often a better presentation medium than talks! For both presenter and viewer! Seriously! #2015SVP

Kamis, 23 Juli 2015

Latest modern science | The last 10% of the poster should take more than 10% of your time - Si Bejo Science

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Over the last few weeks, I�ve been teaching the #SciFund poster class (compiled material here). It was a learning experience for me as well as the students, because I�ve never used Adobe Illustrator before. I made a poster based on some research I hadn�t presented yet. (The paper is in press; I�ll share the poster here once the paper is out of production and ready to read.)

I had something that I could have hung on a poster board at pretty much any conference in the world around the end of the second week. I felt the poster was maybe 90% of what I wanted it to be. But to get to the point where I thought it was almost 100% of what I wanted it to be, took two to three more weeks.

To be clear, I�m not talking about working continuous eight hours a day on a poster for a couple of weeks, but working on it briefly each day for a couple of weeks. You need to be able to step away from the work and look at it later with fresh eyes.

I spent that time adjusting the leading of the text. I made key numbers bigger. I proofread the text, refined it, and proofed it again (and someone will probably still find errors when I show it). I moving around a logo. I tried a different logo, realized it didn�t work, and switched it back to the first one. I tweaked the colours. I added lines, made them thinner, thicker, adjusted the line colours, then made them thinner again.

Those tiny little adjustments may not be something that an average viewer can easily identify when they read your poster, but the difference in the overall impression it leaves on a viewer is huge.



You have to leave yourself time to make all those tiny little adjustments. When you first start making a poster, improvements come fast, and the zones of �I could never hang that up� and �I could show it, but I wouldn�t be proud of it� are narrow.

The range of what is a passable poster is large. And somewhere in that big gray zone of �I like this and nobody would give me grief about it� is where you hit the point of diminishing returns. Sure, the poster is getting better, but not as much as when you started blocking it out.

To get to something that truly stands out, you have to keep working past that point of diminishing returns. You have to be willing to keep adjusting, coming back the next day, and adjusting again. The final improvements will come in at a crawl, not a sprint.

Kamis, 16 Juli 2015

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

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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.

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