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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!

Related posts

Critique: fetal movements 
Critique: Rein it in
Bullets versus sentences

Kamis, 21 Januari 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Thale cress RNA - Si Bejo Science

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Today�s poster is from Andrzej Zielezinski. It was shown at the twentieth annual meeting of the RNA Society last year. Click to enlarge!


This poster feels very contemporary and in tune with the times. The style is very close to �flat design� seen a lot on the web: clean, primary colours, sans serif type, very little shading. (Indeed, the website mentioned on the poster has a similar aesthetic.) I love how the core of the poster (the intro, methods, and results) looks.

The abstract is problematic. At a distance or shrunk down, that big rectangle in the upper left just dominates the poster�s visuals. It draws you in, and give you... blocks of text as a reward.

I would have tried to lighten up that block so it isn�t so visually dominant. In this quick and dirty redo, I�ve made the text that nice green, for emphasis, but put the box into a lighter, more neutral grey.



It�s not quite right, but I think the balance is a little better. The better solution would be to remove it entirely!

The grey stripes in the background are subtle enough that they are not overwhelming. Like the abstract, however, they might be lightened up around the edges f the poster a bit. The stripes are running at three different angles, too: the set running across the bottom is not lining up with the upper left. And if the stripes are going to radiate out from the center of the poster, maybe they should do that in all the corners.

The title bar is unusual: very few people right align their titles, because that�s not where we are trained to read. In this case, because you have that big abstract block in the upper left, having the title on the left too would have been far too much. Having space around the abstract block helps the overall look of the poster.

The title text feels a little light. Because it is set in a low contrast light green in a thin font, with a few grey stripes behind it, it might not be easily readable or noticeable from a distance.

I�m a little puzzled that a website link shows up in two places: under the authors� affiliations, and down in the bottom green bar. I would be tempted to have it in one place alone. My instinct would be to cut the top one, so I could make the title and author�s section a bit roomier, or maybe larger.

Similarly, I can�t quite figure out why two logos are sensibly corralled in the bottom, while one is taking a primo spot in the title bar. I�m guessing the one in the title is the institution and the others are funding agencies?

The genus and species names (Arabidopis thaliana) are not in italics anywhere. My reaction:



Jumat, 15 Januari 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Sea turtles eating trash - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s poster is like those �Spot the difference� cartoons that used to appear in the classified ad section of newspapers (dating myself there). Qamar Schuyler sent me a work in progress, so there are two versions. You can click either to enlarge!


There�s a lot to like. The sea turtle provides a clear cue as to what this poster is about. I wonder if a picture of a turtle ingesting debris might be an even better indicator of the poster�s topic. The trade-off could be that a poster of a turtle in trouble might be disheartening and a turn-off to a potential reader. Maybe the healthy, charismatic turtle used here is the right choice.

The main data, the maps, are up front and center. The big coloured map is placed just where it should be: right in the upper middle. The caption for it, though, is a little problematic, because it�s been severed from the image it describes.


In general, you want to place descriptive text as close to the image it�s linked to as possible.

A similar problem occurs with the smaller maps. While they don�t have to be read in any particular order, they do wind around, snake-like, between the colour map and the captions.


Part of the problem here is that five maps are the same size, and one � for Kemp�s Ridley sea turtle � is narrower. I would still try to put these in a more consistent two by three grid, and just suck up that the last one isn�t a perfect fit. Perhaps the figure caption could slot into the extra space, maybe like this:


Or this:


Of course, I�ve cheated in the sketches above because I haven�t relocated any of the text. Repositioning the figures would require a massive revision of the right side of the poster, perhaps moving the �Results� section into the upper right corner.

Here�s Qamar�s tweaked version. Spot the differences!


Some of the differences I caught (not intended to be an exhaustive list):

  • The box around the conclusions has been given a red border to �pop� the take home message. I like it.
  • A graph has been added to results. I like this, too. Visuals are better than words.
  • A poster number has been added. I�m very mildly against this, because I��m not sure it does much besides take up space. On the other hand, it is unobtrusive and might help someone.
  • The proportions have changed a little.
  • The �Contact me� box in the lower right has been tweaked a bit, and is better aligned with the box above it. I would like it more if it was the same width as the box above, though.

You can see this poster with Qamar at the Ocean Sciences meeting in New Orleans in February. If you can�t make it to the Big Easy, you can read the pre-print of the article here.

Reference

Schuyler QA, Wilcox C, Townsend KA, Wedemeyer-Strombe KR, Balazs G, van Sebille E, Hardesty, BD. 2015. Risk analysis reveals global hotspots for marine debris ingestion by sea turtles. Global Change Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org10.1111/gcb.13078

Kamis, 19 November 2015

Latest modern science | Critique: SAS depot - Si Bejo Science

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Today�s poster come from Maxine Davis, which she did for a small conference. Click to enlarge!

There are a couple of things that are very successful on this poster. The colour scheme is very cohesive, helped by the poster being a pastiche of Home Depot branding. As I�ve said before, basing a poster on an existing colour or branding scheme is a handy shortcut, because they�re tried and tested designs that you know will work.


The yellow highlighting breaks the colour scheme slightly, but it is so effective at drawing attention to key elements of the text that it is okay.

The poster clearly shows that it is meant to be read in rows, so there is no problem in determining reading order. The big orange �How to� balloons on the left are very good guides.

Still, there is probably too much going on in this poster. I suspect that the individual sections might looking fine when you�re looking at part of the poster, but when you step back, there is a lot of stuff competing for attention.

The typesetting is a little frantic. I count at least six different typefaces, which I�ve highlighted below:


Even when the typeface is the same, there�s a lot of other variations that contribute to the feeling of mild disorganization (bullets, bolding, boxes, italics, highlighting, rotation...). Wider margins might also bring a needed sense of calm to the poster.

I like the idea of having the top left image acting as an entry point (and making the homage to Home Depot obvious), but the execution is compromised because the picture is distorted. The store logo should be square, like so:


I would have kept the image in its original, slightly narrower form, and made more room for the subtitle over at the right.

While it�s not visible in thumbnail, there are some overlap and ragged edge problems between the image anf the author credits:

I�m not sure about the winking face next to the name. Some will find it friendly; some will find it frivolous. Home Depot employees do have buttons and badges on their store aprons, and this might potentially be continuing the imitation of the flair of Home Depot staff. But it�s not quite a match, and I feel that if you�re going to follow the design of something, you need to go all the way.

This poster is off to a good start, but would benefit from a very thorough polish of the text, with attention to making the text more consistent across the poster.

Kamis, 12 November 2015

Latest modern science | Critique: 3D sound - Si Bejo Science

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Today�s poster comes from Erlend Magnus Viggen. Click to enlarge!


Erlend had a few notes on this creation.

Since the article is about a computational method that we developed, the poster is a flowchart of the method.

The flowchart works reasonably well, although the reading order of the �Propogation� box in the upper right is a little tricky. If there was a little more room, I might try placing �Sound processing� slightly lower than the text block flanking it. That way, the �Source sound� and �Propogation� would sort of funnel down into �Sound processing.� But this poster has a nice balance of text and margins, and you couldn�t move �sound processing� down without messing with that.

There�s no introduction. I�m not sure to which degree an introduction beyond the title is useful on a poster in any case, but in this case our method is far more relevant for our conference audience than our motivation is. Our use-case is basically outside the scope of the conference.

Smart move, and an excellent example of how designs are often improved by taking things away.

I like how subtle colour gradients are used to distinguish blocks of text instead of heavy-handed outlines.

I�m particularly interested by Erlend�s comments about using institutional styles. I�ve been wary of institutional style guides, because they often prioritize advertising the institution over the content that a poster viewer cares about. Erlend, I think, takes a sensible approach:

I tried to follow the guidelines of my research institute: use a grid, use the official typeface (though I only used it for headers as it�s more of a display typeface), and use colours from the official scheme. While there are more colours in the official scheme, the dark blue one is our main colour and the light gray-brown is the only bright-ish colour among our �main� colours.

Erlend isn�t slavishly following a template, but looking for ways to use elements of the institution�s style. Institutional colour schemes are usually closely examined by professional designers, so you end up with palettes that are harmonious, and maybe a little conservative. The colours should work in lots of different conditions. And you don�t have to use every official colour.

I did something similar recently, when I made a new logo for my homepage. I deliberately wanted to harmonize it with my institution�s logo:


Like Erlend�s case, my university has navy blue and green as secondary colours, but I didn�t use those. I used the same primary colours and font (Caecilia), and customized a swishy capital:




By using the institutional typeface for headings, you evoke the institution in a subtle way. It�s got more finesse than just shoving a logo somewhere on the page. And if you do put in a logo, you avoid having a lot of different fonts fighting each other.

I'm not too happy with not having more pictures, but unfortunately we just don't have any more that would fit well.

Alas! I agree that more graphics and a little less text would be more appealing. Nevertheless, this poster has enough space on it that it doesn�t become an indistinguishable block of grey from a distance.

Related posts

Misplaced priorities on institutional templates

Kamis, 08 Oktober 2015

Latest modern science | Critique: CEOs - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s contribution is from Christine Haskell, who was nice enough to share. Click to enlarge!


Chistine writes:

I�ve seen a number of these now and no one reads their poster, it�s used as more of a discussion tool. I therefore chose a visual, a mobile, to reflect the short and long term balance leaders need to manage their strategies. I will have handouts with references for people to takeaway.

I love the graphic approach using the mobile. It�s awesome. It�s the sort of bold choice that you don�t see often on academic posters, because it�s hard to pull off. It�s super effective.

I worry a bit if breaking up the title along the mobile hides it too much. The individual words are large and readable, but it took me a couple of passes to realize that the phrase �How do purposeful CEOs� leads to �experience growth� leads to �in their organizaions?�, and that it�s all one sentence.

More subtle is that the letters in the title don�t always follow their lines as closely as one might like. Particularly the bottom one, "in their organizations?" is diverging and drifting higher than the line below it.

There�s variation in the spacing between letters. �How do purposeful...� is much tighter than �Experience growth.�

Christina replied:

I�ve reached my graphic-capability threshold. I did this in PowerPoint, and need to move on to other things like writing articles and looking for consulting. I can�t figure out how to make those pesky curves behave better.


Down in 5B, I�m not a fan of the underlining of �Values have lifecycles.� Italics alone does the job.

That sections 4, 5, and 6 each have different bullet styles is a minor inconsistency that Chirstine admitted she just caught at the end. Thus obeying the Law of Maximum Inconvenience.

Jumat, 02 Oktober 2015

Latest modern science | Posters in the humanties - Plus! Critique: Safety - Si Bejo Science

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Today�s poster comes from Joschka Haltaufderheid. Before I get to a critique of the posters, I want to start addressing something Joaschka wrote in the email accompanying the poster:

(F)or researchers in the humanities, making a good poster seems to be quite challenging. Normally we do not present empirical results but rather lines of arguments, considerations of pros and cons, ideas, etc. That makes it very hard to balance text and graphical elements in a proper way since we first need lots of words and second do not have any figures, tables or diagrams at hand.

This is something I�ve thought about more than I�ve written about. Different disciplines in the humanities will likely have different tools at their disposal. Historians might have images of artifacts. Those studying literature will have texts. Both might have representations of the people they are discussing.

But, if you are in a situation where your main tools are words, there are two skills you need to master: editing and typography.

I�ve talked before about how uninviting long blocks of text are. You must find ways to convey your key point in as few words as possible. You must be ruthless about editing your text. Try to find a few, choice, tweetable phrases, and highlight those. People love aphorisms.

You can turn words into graphic elements with good typography. Compare this bit of text:

Give thy thoughts no tongue. - Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3

Sure, you could put that bit of text on a poster like that. Or you could put it like this:


Magazines and newspapers turn words into graphic elements all the time. Pull quotes. Drop caps.The choice of typeface and colour. These are not simple techniques to master, but they can give a text-based poster a graphic appeal that a document does not.

On with Joschka�s poster, which is used with his permission. Click to enlarge!


The accompanying picture of the sign is a good attention getter, and a signal that viewers will understand. There may not be enough contrast between the sign and the text where the two overlap, however. Look at the words on top of the �TY� in �SAFETY�, for example. Some slight repositioning might allow you to keep the interesting overlap with less conflict between the image and text.

I love how the title is handled. It�s given plenty of white space around it so that nothing competes with it for attention.

The rest of the poster reminds me very much of international typographic style that was popular in the 1960s. It�s a very modernist look using a sans serif typeface and a strong grid.

A few changes in typesetting could make the text less intimidating. The �Background� section appears as one text block, the right indentation indicates its meant to be read as two paragraphs. These paragraphs might be separated by a bit more space, indents, or both.

Similarly, a little more space between the headings and the text below might be useful in emphasizing the headings.

The figures are helpful graphic elements and well placed, although the top of Figure 1 comes too close to touching the text above it.

Overall, this is a strong design. I�m intrigued that the design strikes me as very �European.� I wonder if I could have guessed where Joschka is writing from.

Kamis, 17 September 2015

Latest modern science | Critique: The social network - Si Bejo Science

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Something about this looks familiar. Today�s poster comes from Igor Miklou�ic. Click to enlarge!


I love this idea. I�ve talked before about how it can be so helpful to base a poster off an existing design. Make a poster about Facebook look like Facebook. Brilliant. It immediately helps viewers recognize what they�re in for.

The poster runs into problems because it doesn�t follow the Facebook format closely enough! Facebook posts are usually short, and accompanied by a picture. Instead, we get some sizable blocks of text with no pictures, and they look gray and uninviting at a distance:


This is a limitation of copying another design. The design of a poster would benefit from changing the text size. But following the design of Facebook means you can�t, because then it won�t look like Facebook, which is, after all, the point.

This might be fixed by a substantial restructure of the middle of the poster to break the big posts into several small ones, perhaps with a few graphics. This would not be a simple change, but might be worthwhile.

Kamis, 10 September 2015

Latest modern science | Critique: Quality mitochondria - Si Bejo Science

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Today�s poster comes from Arunas Radzvilavicius, and is shown with his kind permission. Click to enlarge!


The layout, the colour, the generous space, the use of graphic touches are all things to like on this poster. It�s very nice. But sometimes, a poster�s own worst critic is its designer. Arunas wrote:

The optimal amount of text on the poster is something I still can't seem to get right. I always seem to reduce the amount of text to the possible minimum, but that often leads to the poster becoming unintelligible to people not familiar with the details of my research.

How much to write on a poster is always a challenge, although most academics have the opposite problem of Arunas and leave in far, far too much.

The low amount of text is inviting to a reader from a distance, but perhaps confusing when you get up close. Here�s the start:

Isogamy: mitochondria inherited from only one (UPI) or both (BPI) mating types. Ancestral metazoan state. BPI if mutation rate was low.

This is so condensed, it�s close to shorthand. I struggle to revise this into full sentences, because some of the logical connections between words have been erased by the editing. I think this might be close to true:

In isogamy, mitochondria are inherited from one (uniparental isogamy, or UPI) or both (uniparental isogamy, or BPI) mating types. Isogamy is the ancestral metazoan state, with BPI favoured if the mutation rate was low.

Full sentences add more clarity than they take up space.

Seeing this poster shrunk down, it might benefit from the headings being a little more prominent. The poster is a little dark overall, and the reduced contrast dos not help the headings to �pop.� Likewise, using all capitals for the headings make them a little harder to read from a distance.

Kamis, 03 September 2015

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

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Today�s poster comes from Vasco Elbrecht. Before I get to his poster, Vasco has a whole series of YouTube videos on making posters in InDesign, so you might want to check those out!

On to the poster that Vasco sent to me and let me share it with you. Click to enlarge!


My first reaction was that there�s a lot going on in this poster. It was a little overwhelming and intimidating.

The layout of the poster isn�t to blame for the feeling of busyness. The structure of the poster is actually reasonably clear and easy to follow.

A lot of the feeling of busyness has to do with the colours. Looking at it felt a like looking at a busy city�s business district:


There are five big blocks of colour on this poster: a red box, a green box, a yellow note, and orange note, and a light blue sidebar. And there is the data at the bottom, which also uses bright primary colours.

There may not be much that can be done about the data at the bottom, but the other five blocks might benefit from being more similar. Here is a quick and dirty example:


This redesign points out that the logos are also contributing to the business. Three of the five are dark blue, which isn�t in line with the rest of the poster. The dark blue blocks are also competing with the title for attention: the position says �the logos are important� (Cosmo principle), when the title should be most important.

Again, a quick revision that tries to bring the title out by repositioning and shrinking the logos (the title size is the same):


Now the emphasis is clearly on the title. Shrinking the logos helped emphasize the title by creating more white space to separate the title from everything else. The overall effect is a little calmer and more approachable.

Let�s revert back to the original colour scheme for a moment and have another look at that.


Over on the left hand side, the brightly coloured boxes again create a problem of emphasis. The highlighted colours and boxes, particularly from a distance, say, �I�m important, read me first!� The text supports this, too: �The problem� and �The solution� are in bold, and meant as key summaries.

If all the graphic and text cues say, �read me first,� why not put them first?


Some of the things I like about this poster? This poster has uneven sections, but there are visual signals that make it easy to follow. The lines between the columns is better done than on many posters, providing a clear guide that isn�t overwhelming. The use of subtle �A,� �B,� �C� icons help make the order clear and add a nice graphic touch. The sidebar clearly signals stuff which is nonessential to the main presentation of the poster. The spot for stickies is also a nice invitation for interaction.

City photo from here.

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.

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