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Kamis, 24 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Lessons from Skin Wars: Have a focal point - Si Bejo Science

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I�ve been catching up with a show called Skin Wars on Hulu (new season coming on Game Show Network in April). It�s a competition reality show along the lines of Project Runway, Top Chef, and FaceOff: make something really cool, really fast. The cool thing they�re making in this case is body painting.

While watching the show, the judges often criticize a painting for not having a focal point. The artists make very intricate paintings, but when you step back, it�s all a confused mess. Nothing stands out.

I often see this with posters. Because posters tend to include way too much text, everything tends to turn into a uniform gray. Graphs tend to look alike.There�s few things that demand attention.

For instance, here�s a painting with no focal point:


Here�s another example of a painting, by Kadinsky, but this time with a clear focal point:


I�m willing to bet the thing that pops out is the dark circle in the upper left.

The reason is that the dark circle stands in contrast to most of the rest of the painting, which is light and has lots of straight lines and angles. Here�s another example of contrast being used to create a focal point:


It�s a contrasting colour, but a contrasting shape would work too. Imagine an unripened banana in the place of the red apple in the picture above. You�d still look more at the banana, because it is different.

Another simple way to create a focal point is with that most underused tool, white space:


There are lots of blue circles on the page, but the one surrounded by lots of white space is emphasized.

A third way to create a focal point is with lines:


Thanks to perspective, the strong lines of the train tracks, the top and bottom of the train cars, and the treetops all converge onto the vanishing point, which becomes the image�s focal point.

To use a focal point in a poster, you first need to decide what the most important thing on your poster than you want to emphasize. Once you have done that, use the three tips above (and many others besides!) to create a clear focal point on your poster.

External links

Dominance: Creating Focal Points In Your Design
Gestalt Principles: How Are Your Designs Perceived?
Designing with strong simple focal points
How to use focal points to enhance your photography
Top 25 mistakes artists make #2: not adding a focal point

Landscape from here; Kadinsky painting from here; apple picture from here; abstract from here.; mountains from here.

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, 24 Desember 2015

Latest modern science | Lessons from the Miss Universe 2015 pageant: behind many fails lurk bad design choices - Si Bejo Science

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Anyone performing live dreads screwing up. At least in theatre, it�s unlikely to be recorded. But on television, those epic fails will live on for a long time.

This weekend, everyone was talking about this year�s Miss Universe pageant. I am not particularly interested in these events, but host Steve Harvey made an astonishing mistake on live television. He named the wrong winner.


It was just terrible for everyone concerned.

But soon after the event, the card Harvey had to read was posted:


Although this article says, �it�s safe to say it wasn�t the cue card�s fault,� it�s not that cut and dry. When the card was posted on Facebook:

The post has received almost 5000 comments, many agreeing it was understandable he misconstrued the order.

Suddenly, the path to the screw-up seems much more clear. This card did not help Harvey. And the problems with this card are ones that I see on posters all the time.

First, the card doesn�t follow our expected pattern for reading. Instead of the list running from top to bottom, after two names, it suddenly veers right into unknown territory. As this article put it:

(W)hy would they put the winner all the way down at the bottom, underneath �2nd runner up� and �1st runner up?� Everyone knows what �1st� means, and that�s just confusing(.)

There�s actually a term for the phenomenon of tending to ignore things that are placed over to the right: banner blindness. In this time of high Internet use, we�ve gotten used to mostly irrelevant stuff being shoved over to the sides, so people don�t look there very much.


The positions of the three slots on the card becomes more critical when you consider the circumstances when the card is read.

Harvey first reads the card when three finalists are standing to announce the second runner up. Then, to announce the winner, Harvey reads the card when two finalists are standing. When you have two people standing, it�s easy to make the link from the two people to the two words on the left, USA and Colombia. And which one are you going to read? 

And there�s one more problem:

�Philippines�... is printed precisely where a user would likely place their thumb.

Second, the size of the text doesn�t signal importance consistently. The best design feature of this card is that �Miss Universe 2015� is set in a large point size. But the critical word, the winning contestant, is far too small. It just vanishes off the page.

If �Philippines� had been the same size as �Miss Universe 2015,� I think the chance of a mistake would have dropped way down.

One other possibility would have been to make one separate card that declared the winner, with nothing else on it, so you could not confuse the sequence. But it�s easy to say that in retrospect, knowing that Harvey made a mistake.

I like this redesign:


Another redesign is here.

This card may well become one of the most intensely scrutinized pieces of design since the �butterfly ballots� in the 2000 American presidential election.
Everyone would like to think that they could read a card like the one that was posted. It wasn�t as though the text was unclear or incorrect. All you had to do was read. But the reality is that people make mistakes, and the way you expect someone to read a card is not necessarily the way they will read it.

External links

Look at Steve Harvey�s Card � He Was Set up to Fail
Would you be confused by the Miss Universe winner�s card?
Here�s A Look At The �Miss Universe� Ballot Card That Caused Steve Harvey To Malfunction 
Steve Harvey Didn�t Ruin Miss Universe, Bad Design Did
We asked design experts if Steve Harvey's Miss Universe flub can be blamed on the ballot card
Don�t Blame Steve Harvey: Bad Design Caused the Miss Universe Fiasco
Last night�s Miss Universe screw-up could have been prevented with good UX

Hat tip to Sakshi Puri.

Kamis, 17 Desember 2015

Latest modern science | Using bad design to make a good point - Si Bejo Science

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Crossposted, with slight edits, from NeuroDojo because I am way behind on grading!

Michael Eisen recently took all the journal titles off descriptions of his papers on his lab website. This upset some people, which Eisen chalked it up to �the cult of the journal title.�

Alternate hypothesis: maybe it upset people because it was a bad design decision.

In exploring design on this blog, one of the most powerful lessons I�ve learned has been that good design is about empathy. Good designers empathize with their users, anticipate their needs, and fulfill their needs.

One of the things a person going to a lab publication list wants to do is to be able to find articles that interest them. Removing journal titles makes it harder for users to find articles. And while many (but, importantly, not all) articles have DOIs and links, they are not necessarily things that people relate to as much as a journal title. If you need to scribble a reference on a piece of paper � which you often have to do at a conference � a journal name, volume, and first page number is easier than a DOI link. Change one digit in a DOI and it doesn�t work at all. A journal based citation has more forgiveness for error.

The argument that you don�t need journal titles because everything is on the Internet overlooks that the Internet doesn�t need journal articles. People do. And people don�t always have great access to the Internet, like, say, at a poster session in a conference where there is not always WiFi. People work with imperfect memories (some of us more than others) before starting a search on Google Scholar or PubMed. There are many papers that I look at, and I will never commit the DOI or link to memory. I remember the journal that papers were published in quite regularly, though. I don�t remember journals because of their Impact Factors, but because of the content of the journal, the layout and formatting, and other features. A PLOS ONE paper looks different than a PeerJ paper.

By removing a piece of information that users expect and want, Eisen is not meeting the user�s needs. Quite the opposite, he�s explicitly criticizing users who want this information. But good design is not about the designer. It�s about the experience of the end user.

That said, running in the opposite direction is no better:


This was a joke from Yoav Gilad (archived by Claus Wilke; it doesn�t look like that now). But for the sake of argument, let�s analyze it anyway. Here, the changes in text size for the journals (related to Impact Factor) is, for those outside of academia, pointless, and therefore confusing. For those in academia, it looks like an ego trip. (��Oooh, look at the fancy journal I published in!�)

Again: design is not about you.

Now, there is more to life than good design. Removing journal titles from a publication list is a successful act of advocacy against evaluation by �prestige,� which is a much-needed discussion to have. But it may be that users are upset not (only?) because of a cultish belief that journal titles are important signifiers of quality, but because they realize that the design effectively gives them the finger by leaving out something they want.

External links

What�s in a journal name?
Picture from here.

Kamis, 03 Desember 2015

Latest modern science | Lessons from sex toys: you have to let other people try things out - Si Bejo Science

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And I thought I was pushing the envelope when I talked about how lingerie design could inform poster design. Well, here we go for the edge of the envelope again...

This post was inspired by the article on the design of sex toys. Once you get past the giggles inherent in talking about sex toys, it�s a very thoughtful article on design more generally, and there are lessons that can be applied to conference posters.

As I�ve mentioned before, anyone designing anything must always have empathy for the end user. That article talks about how you have to know those users in detail, not just in a vague, �they�re kind of like this� way.

For instance, if a designer is making something to be held by a hand, there are measurements for every dimension of the hand. And not just for one hand, the average hand, either � measurements exist for every dimension of the 5th and 95th percentiles of hand size as well. �But that�s just not available for designing sex toys,� (engineer Janet) Lieberman says. There is no corresponding data for vulvas. There is no official classification for the many different types of vulvas, and no sense of how common each type might be.

For conference posters, this might mean considering the average height of people, which would affect where the eye level of a reader is. You should also think about the readers who might have problems like colour blindness or presbyopia.

The part of the article that made me think the most about my own design practices, though, was the discussion of user testing. Sure, it might sound like fun at first... but think about being the first to try an untested prototype with your most sensitive bits.

(N)ot surprisingly, getting data on the efficacy of a sex toy isn�t always easy. �If you�re designing a (children�s) toy, you can put 10 kids in a room together and have them all play with that toy and get a bunch of data really quickly,� says Lieberman. But with adult products, designers and engineers are rarely present for the actual product testing, and getting feedback can be challenging. With Eva (a hands-free vibrator for use during intercourse), Lieberman found that women who tested it out struggled to describe why something did, or didn�t, work well for them. And the trials are time-consuming: a week�s worth of testing time for each pair of participants. ...

Dame Products has also employed the services of a team of gynecological teaching associates � women trained to provide medical students with hands on guidance through the particulars of performing a GYN exam � for one-on-one product testing sessions. Though the GTAs don�t provide insight on how Eva works during intercourse, they do help the Dame Products team examine how well the vibrator is secured by a wide array of labia; and, with their training in anatomy, they�re able to offer the nuanced, thoughtful feedback that many earlier testers could not.

I realized that it had been a long time since I had showed drafts of my posters to anyone else before printing them. This is dumb of me. I rehearse my presentations I give with slides. Why don�t I do something similar for posters?

Now, having written this blog for over six years, maybe I do have a little more knowledge that allows me to create something passable without having other people look at it. But that doesn�t let me off the hook for user testing.

Back in February, when I did a poster workshop, I did a little user testing, and noticed:

(T)he difference between the intended order of information, and how people actually looked at the poster. Even... posters, with a clear three column order, were not often read in that order.

How I think people will read through my posters is no guarantee that this is how they will actually read through them. There is no substitute for criticism and feedback. I badly need to get into the habit of showing my posters to others before taking them to the conference again.

As I was writing this post, I saw this on Facebook, from my buddy game designer John Wick:


FIRST RULE OF GAME DESIGN: External contact always causes dramatic change to your design.The moment you hand any game�...
Posted by John Wick on Tuesday, November 24, 2015

One problem, though, in getting proper feedback is that printing full-sized can be expensive. It would be helpful if you could print a greyscale draft version on cheap newsprint paper before going to the full-coloured glossy paper.

Finally, the article talks about another barrier to getting the feedback you need for great design: social pressures.

�The only difference I noticed [between designing mainstream and adult products] was the stigma� that was attached to designing a vibrator compared to another consumer electronic product,� says B�har.

People don�t want to talk about their experience with sex toys. (See this probably NSFW this Sex in the City clip about the reluctance to talk about them and the difficulty in getting user feedback.) I�m willing to bet that when most people get a badly made sex toy, about all that happens is silent grumbling to themselves. There are strong conventions about keeping sexual experiences private, so it takes a certain amount of courage even to leave a one star review on an online shopping site.

There�s a similar social stigma about calling out bad posters or presentations at conferences. We might say, �Did you see that?� sotto voce at the conference lunch table. We might write a tweet. But to say to a speaker at the time, �The design of your poster needs work� doesn�t happen all that often, because we�re worried about being rude. And that�s impeding our ability to get better posters and presentations.

Related posts

Lessons from lingerie
More lessons from lingerie: details versus decoration

External links

Why aren�t vibrators as good as other gadgets?
Let�s stop enabling bad speakers

Hat tip to Gerty Z. Picture from here.

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, 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
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