Today, I�m pleased to present an
award winning poster from Emma Locatelli. This one took Council Poster Prize at the Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting in 2012. You can click to enlarge:
This is going to be a short critique, because this is a sharp, well done poster. (And I say this not just because my own research revolves around crustaceans like the crabs here!) Let�s check off a few of reasons this poster is a major successe:
- The poster has two clear columns, which make it completely clear what the reading order is.
- The story is told with a lot of pictures and minimal text.
- Most things are neatly aligned with another element on the page.
- There is reasonable amount of white space, so that the poster doesn�t look too crowded.
- There�s a clear take-home message.
- Logos are down in the fine print where they belong!
Where might we see some improvement?
There is an implied question in the first line of the introduction, lurking like a hidden fossil:
Three primary hypotheses can explain the dearth of land crabs in the fossil record(.)
I�d state the question outright: �
Why are land crabs� fossils so rare?� This might have even been the title of the poster: shorter, punchier, and perhaps more likely to draw in curious passers-by.
The poster is set in Gill Sans, a classic typeface that I enjoy and use a lot myself. Here, though, I wonder if a more
modern typeface in the same style might have made it look fresher and lighter. For example, bold Gill Sans looks a little clunky. There is a lot of bold on this poster for emphasis. I would use less bold, probably removing it from the methods completely. The more emphasis you use, the less effective it is.
While the poster does a generally good job of spacing and alignment, there are a few places that could be improved. The graph caption above �Subsurface alignment� in the results come a trifle too close to the text below it.
Similarly, it would have been nice if the figures in the methods and the results � two rows, both three to a column � were equally wide, so that the two rows of figures aligned perfectly. And there are a few other quirky spots where things that should line up or be closer to each other are not.
There�s one tiny typesetting inconsistency. The last list item of the introduction ends with a period, but none of the other sentences in lists end in periods. This is such a small thing that if someone pointed it out to me, I would joke that it�s
there to avoid offending God, because only God is perfect.
