Latest modern science | Four simple tips for shortening your poster - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Four simple tips for shortening your poster - Si Bejo Science

text

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Few things will turn away a potential poster viewer like long paragraphs of text. So one of the recommendations I (and many others) make for posters is to write less stuff. But it is not easy.

There�s a saying (wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln), that if you have a short time to cut down a tree, spend most of it sharpening the axe. Here are some ways to sharpen your editorial axe.

1. Walk away.

When you�re in the middle of a project that you designed and carried out, everything seems important. But time away from something helps bring clarity. Think about a favourite album or TV series that you haven�t watched in years. You won�t remember all of it; you will remember the highlights.

You can get clarity by not working on a poster for a few days, then coming back at it with fresh eyes.

I think this is be the surest and best approach, the problem is that it takes time. You have to start early, and allot �cool down time� of a few days where you do not look at the poster. Given how many academics don�t want to give posters because they want to slap together a PowerPoint talk on the plane on their way to a conference, getting them to work on posters well in advance is a tall order.

2. Show it to someone else.

An outside viewer doesn�t have that emotional or intellectual investment in a project that you have. The further away you can get, the better. Show your poster to someone who isn�t in your lab. SHow it to a non-expert. Show it to someone with a different skillset.

Just remember that an outside observer is not necessarily an unbiased one. Everyone has their own tastes and preferences and styles. An outside observer may not be objective, but they will at least have different biases than you.

3. ABT.

�ABT� is short for �And... But... Therefore.� You take two facts (joined by �and�), followed by the complication (�but�), and a resolution (�therefore�).
 
It is one of the single most effective tools I have found for drilling down to a key point. And it has the advantage of being quick (unlike #1) and not needing others (unlike #2).

I�ve done this with many poster presenters. When I ask them to talk about what there poster is about, it often takes a few minutes. I don�t think many of them believe me when I say they should be able to summarize their poster in a sentence. Then I do it using the ABT format. And I can usually see the expression on their faces indicating I�ve hit very close to the mark.

I wouldn�t recommend condensing the entire poster to one sentence, but it�s great at chopping a couple of lengthy introductory paragraphs into one crisp sentence.

Randy Olson first introduced this sentence structure in Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking (which I reviewed here), and has continued working with this tool in Houston, We Have a Narrative.

Additional: Randy notes that you can learn more about ABT in Story Circle Training here. He also advises for the verbal presentation that goes along with the poster:

1) Say your ABT, 2) Ask what person studies, 3) Find bridge between the two (from Samantha Roy)

4. Practice ruthlessness in all your writing. 

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White is not a perfect book on writing. Likewise, the fretting about Marxism in George Orwell�s essay, �Politics and the English Language,� is very out-of-date. But both remain worth reading because of their emphasis on being concise.

There are many lists that alert you to lengthy stock phrases that can be replaced with shorter words. Once you attune yourself to stock phrases (�At this point in time,� �The fact that�), it becomes easier to recognize them, cut them out, and replace them without losing any meaning (�Now,� �That�).

External links

To Cut Down a Tree in Five Minutes Spend Three Minutes Sharpening Your Axe
Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking review

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

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

design text type crimes

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

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.

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

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

critiques text

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

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

Latest modern science | Bullets versus sentences - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Bullets versus sentences - Si Bejo Science

text

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Some other resources on poster design recommend that people use bullet lists extensively for their posters. I advise against it, most of the time.

The pros of bullet lists is that by their nature, people tend to write less text. That concision is very useful on a poster, I admit.

But I want to argue there are more negatives to using bullets that positives.

First, my experience with looking at PowerPoint slides is that people are inconsistent in how they type bullet lists. For example, people often punctuate some bullet points with a period, but leave others without a period. When people write sentences in paragraphs, they will put a period at the end of every sentence.

Second, the size and spacing of bullet points is often badly done in software. Even PowerPoint, the culprit that made bullets ubiquitous, doesn�t scale well when you move outside of the standard slide sizes. Here�s a quick mock-up for a four foot wide poster with a bulleted list (click to enlarge):

Under this default scheme, the bullets are too far from the text. The spacing between lines and points is also a little dodgy. Microsoft Publisher, which I use a lot for posters, handles bullets even more poorly.

Third, bullets destroy narrative. Edward Tufte has made a thorough analysis (from The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, excerpt quoted here):

Lists can communicate three logical relationships: sequence (first to last in time); priority (least to most important or vice versa); or simple membership in a set (these items relate to one another in some way, but the nature of that relationship remains unstated). And a list can show only one of those relationships at a time.

Bullet lists may be more concise, but they are impoverished compared to sentences in paragraphs. Sentences can express many more relationships.

Fourth, readers are trained to read sentences in paragraphs. It is the most common thing we read, and is how we expect to absorb complicated ideas.

This is not to say that bulleted lists are useless. They are completely appropriate for short lists. A poster, though, should be more than just short lists. For example, I feel okay about using a bulleted list for a quick summary of my case again bullet points:

• Bullets are used inconsistently
• Bullets are poorly typeset
• Bullets show relationships poorly
• Readers are used to sentences

I don�t think I would convince anyone of my argument if that list were all I posted.

External links

The Zen of Presentations, Part 41: Consistency

Photo by David Stillman on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Latest modern science | Stretching out your title - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Stretching out your title - Si Bejo Science

text

Unknown 10.46 Add Comment

People are used to tinkering with the vertical spacing of text; having to make a manuscript double spaced, for instance. But they are not as familiar with how to make text look good by adjusting the horizontal spacing.

John McWade reminds us of a useful tip about the spacing of type:

Text meant to be read at a distance � like the title of your poster � should be expanded a little!

Since most people are making posters in PowerPoint (despite my constant pestering for you to stop doing that), Let me tell you a couple of ways to do this in PowerPoint.

Select your text, right click it, select �Font,� and pick the �Character spacing� tab. That allows you quite precise control over the spacing:

There is also a �horizontal spacing� button in the �Font� ribbon. The drop down options for that one, however, are more general: �Loose� and �Very loose.�

Here�s a sample of how text looks expanded. �Loose� is a little more than 2 point spacing.

�Loose� might not be a bad setting to try for titles, and maybe headings, on posters.

After you�re done here, practice your horizontal letter placement skills by playing this kerning game.

External links

The unexpected typestyle of Ikea

Latest modern science | Your title is 90% of your poster - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Your title is 90% of your poster - Si Bejo Science

design text

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

I�m riffing off of this post by Randy Olson (click to enlarge):

In today�s short attention-spanned world, headlines are about 90% of your communication effort (the text is just a bunch of stuff to justify the headline, meant only for people with a lot of time on their hands).

If someone were to read just your poster title, would they know what you wanted them to know?

Latest modern science | Text wrapping in Publisher, or, �Why are you still using PowerPoint for posters?� - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Text wrapping in Publisher, or, �Why are you still using PowerPoint for posters?� - Si Bejo Science

layout software text

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

Alexis Rudd made the poster below in PowerPoint.

But Alexis wanted something else to make posters. I asked if she had Publisher, often bundled with the same Microsoft Office package that contains PowerPoint. She did.

A problem with the poster above (similar to this one) is making sure elements sit nicely next to the curves. Just to give an example of how Publisher does this, I knocked out this example in a couple of minutes:

Here�s what I did. Inserted a text box with some dummy text. I inserted a picture on top of the text, and Publisher automatically flowed the text around the picture. The order is important; text won�t flow around objects underneath it.

I cropped the picture to an oval shape, and moved it away from the middle of the column. Right clicked the image and picked, �Format picture� and selected the �Layout� tab. Then I selected �Tight� as the wrapping style. And you see the results above.

It is still not on a par with pro typesetting; the large text size is creating some uncomfortable gaps. The text is ragged right; some of the jags can be smoothed out by justifying it:

Still not pro level, mainly because I can�t find any way to adjust the distance the text sits from the picture. For rectangular pictures, you can use �Square� wrapping style, and that lets you adjust the distance the text is from the object very easily.

But try doing something like that in PowerPoint at all. You will tear your hair out. Then...

Related posts

No more slidesters, part 2: Three Publisher tips

Latest modern science | Common problems - Si Bejo Science

Latest modern science | Common problems - Si Bejo Science

grids layout text

Unknown 05.00 Add Comment

I teach a technical writing class in which I ask students to create posters. I give the students some instruction and and good ideas for poster layout. Generally, their work is as good or better than conference posters I see.

The top three problems are:

1. Clutter: It�s hard to generalize the sources of clutter. It ranges from unnecessary borders to gradient fills to too many elements on the page.
2. Proximity: People underestimate how much white space they need around objects. In particular, they don�t put big enough margins around pictures.
3. Text greyness: Even though my students generally do a good job of making the text large enough to be readable, they often end up with too much of it.

If there is a common element to these three problems, it�s the urge to put too much stuff on the page. Editing and cutting is a tough skill that takes a lot of practice to master.