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Jumat, 11 April 2014

Latest modern science | Time flew! The (belated) fifth anniversary - Si Bejo Science

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Whoops! I missed it!

I have had my head down doing a lot of technical academic writing. I completely forgot about the fifth blogiversary of Better Posters at the start of March!

It is a little hard to fathom that I�ve already been trying to make conference halls more beautiful, on poster at a time, for half a decade.

That I have made it five years, and kept the �one post a week� schedule steady throughout that time, is thanks to the readers of this blog. It�s my readers who convinced me I am doing something helpful here, and have given me lots of fodder to blog about. Thank you!

Picture by Gerry Dulay on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Kamis, 10 April 2014

Latest modern science | Critique: Sea otters - Si Bejo Science

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Jessica Hale tweeted this poster (click to enlarge) for the 2014 Northwest Student Society for Marine Mammalogy annual meeting with a request to make it, and I quote, �suck less�:


I tweeted these suggestions back to Jessica, which I have slightly elaborated on here.

A good design practice is to put things where the reader will need them. With only one reference, why not put it where the reader encounters it, in context: on the left column of text, instead of at the end of poster?

The �point of need� principle also means keeping related objects together. I like text describing results directly above or below figures, rather than all figures in one column. See this post for another example. Similarly, the statistical results could be put in the white space of the graphs, or in the caption, rather than in separate text in the results on the right, at some distance from the graphs.

Try removing the bullet points, and use normal sentences and paragraphs instead. PowerPoint, despite its name, often handles bullet lists fairly inelegantly, with strange indents.

Maybe the graphs could have same light blue background with no lines around them, so they would match the text boxes. This would mean picking the right colours for the graphs to match the blues. The figure in the left column might be a little more tricky to harmonize, but would be worth considering if it could be done.

Are the columns the same width? The right one looks narrower.

If you leave figures in central column, maybe you could consolidate the text boxes in the right and left columns into one box, not 2-3.

I wonder if you could have a stronger take home message. �Different otters are different� seems less memorable than you might like.

Try bolding everything you�ve underlined. As in, bold, instead of underline, not in addition to.

In a species name, �sp.� should not be italicized (see last bullet point under �Results: Season�).

Update, 3 May 2014: With a little advice and feedback, Jessica won the poster competition! Here is the final version she took to the conference, which you can see incorporates some of the feedback above.




Kamis, 03 April 2014

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

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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

Kamis, 27 Maret 2014

Latest modern science | Link roundup for March 2014 - Si Bejo Science

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Hood Scientist takes a look at the making of this cool wanted poster:


I�m also grateful to the link to this post on making chemistry posters. It includes this video. The advice is generally sound, though I have misgivings like it assuming you will use PowerPoint (get a real graphics editor, folks!) and advising adding institution logo (although it doesn�t use the dreaded bookend).


This blog is mainly geared towards scientists, but it uses the crafts and tools developed by graphic design. Ben Lillie makes a similar case: scientists should look outside their own fields to see what others have learned, particularly in science communication. And a poster is just a communication tool, after all:

(C)ommunicating science, fundamentally, isn�t very different from communicating anything else. It isn�t easy, but the answers are out there. The textbooks are already written. ...

I believe in the value of expertise. There are people who�ve dedicated their lives to learning and teaching how to connect and communicate. Why wouldn�t we avail ourselves of that?

A menu has some interesting parallels with a poster: you both have to contain a lot of information in a logical structure that people can find. This article looks at the redesign of the menu at IHOP:

The menu IHOP ended up launching ... prioritizes images over text, with large pictures of food offerings studding the menu�s pages. It also offers color-coding�a feature meant, in part, to draw the eye toward certain food offerings and categories. Perhaps the most important change from the previous menu, though, was a grouping system that categorized food items into neat culinary taxonomies: pancakes on this page, omelettes on this one, etc.

Hat tip to Emily Anthes.

I am often telling people to leave more space on posters. Here�s a brilliant case of using space to make a point:


Hat tip to Amanda Bauer and Stephanie Stamm.

TED provides a list of ten quotes about design. I particularly like this one:

�If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.� � William McDonough

New Scientist has an article about typefaces that, in the magazine, was titled, �Tricksy type: how fonts can mess with your mind� (paywalled). The title in their weekly newsletter was better, though. It was, �Comic Sans is evil.�



Congratulations to reader Alex Warnecke, who took the Provost�s Award in the ecology section of San Diego State University�s recent student conference. She was nice enough to say this blog helped.

Post by Alex Warneke.

Kamis, 20 Maret 2014

Latest modern science | Misplaced priorities on institutional templates - Si Bejo Science

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Commenter k brought my attention to this poster template from Iowa State University (click to enlarge).


The template gets it exactly wrong. The order of elements at the top is 180� away from what it should be.

This template reflects misguided priorities. It�s intended to do one thing: make sure the institution�s name is the most important thing on the poster. I repeat this from Garr Reynolds (my emphasis):

The logo won�t help make a sell or make a point, but the clutter it brings does add unnecessary noise and makes the presentation visuals look like a commercial. And people hate commercials or being sold to.

The most important thing on the poster should be the title. That is the most important information for people walking by at the conference. The principles of text hierarchy suggest that the title should be bigger than all other text, and at the top of the page, and possibly in colour. Instead, it�s the fourth thing on the page, small, and in black and white.

The second most important thing should be the people. Posters are social objects, meant to facilitate conversations between people. Names matter.

Department and institution names are the least important things for both the reader (who is the one this poster is for) and the presenter.

Worse, the template adds space for the conference name and the date up at the upper right. Of what possible use are those pieces of information? Presumably, people know what conference they are attending. They rarely just wander into a convention center just on a whim. And I am reasonably sure most people do not need a poster to tell them the date.

The �Acknowledgments� space at the end is a box that spans the entire width of the poster. This is not a good typesetting practice, because long lines are hard to read. Most typesetters recommend lines be about 10-12 words long.

What a template should do is to help someone make layout faster. A template that offered a precise, evenly spaced three column grid would save someone a lot of time trying to calculate the column width, including enough white space, and so on. Instead, this template has just a single word box with �Content.� That�s not helpful to the poster maker at all.

And the moral of the story is: Just because your institution suggests it doesn�t mean it�s a good idea!

Kamis, 13 Maret 2014

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

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Today�s posters come from Anna Pryslopska, and are shown with her permission. Let�s see the first version of her poster (click to enlarge):


Anna created this poster, and the revision below, in Inkscape, �which was a PITA�, she adds.

After she presented this poster, Anna revised it for another conference after one of her viewers said it looked �like candy (not serious).� Here is her second poster:


This is a successful revision on many, many counts. The first and most obvious change is that the colour scheme has been lightened and brightened. That alone makes a huge improvement, because it de-emphasizes the boxes on the poster. I might have tried making the �Background� box in the upper left the same light blue as all the others.

The title and headings are larger in the revision, creating a stronger text hierarchy.

Where both posters still struggle is with the reading order. Graphs should be next to the text that describes them whenever possible, and here, they are not. Let�s put a line from each graph to the places referenced in the text:


While the graphs appear in order, they are often separated from the text by a long way. Figure 2 and 3 sit right next to each other, suggesting they will be referred to together, but instead they are discussed almost at opposite ends of the poster.

Making matters slightly worse is that the reference in the text to point to each graph (e.g., �see (1)�) is low-key and slightly cryptic. For instance, many people use numbers alone to indicate references. It might have been better to label each one as a figure, and put, �see Figure 1� in the text.


Anna concluded with some general comments.
I think a lot of the poster would be much better if we had LaTeX templates that don�t suck. My university has a corporate design one that doesn�t work. They actually paid someone good money for that... I know almost all my colleagues use LaTeX or PowerPoint for their posters and both require a lot of knowledge to make something nice and �nobody�s got time for that.�


I agree somewhat. Templates can be helpful, but the lack of a standard poster size makes creating a template difficult. I think examples are more powerful than templates, which may be why so many readers tell me they find the critiques useful.

Also, I know of nobody in my circle of colleagues who uses LaTeX. A couple of blog readers have mentioned they use it, but for the vast majority of people, posters mean PowerPoint. For those wondering what LaTeX is about, maybe try this:


I include it despite my reservations about a video titled �Learn Latex in 5 minutes� that is six minutes long.

Kamis, 06 Maret 2014

Latest modern science | Review: Slidedocs - Si Bejo Science

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Nancy Duarte is one of the best in the business when it comes to design of slide decks. After three conventionally published books on paper, she has just released her fourth, Slidedocs, as a free ebook created using, and evangelizing, PowerPoint.

To some degree, PowerPoint is Duarte�s hammer, and she�s on the lookout for nails to use it on. Previously, Garr Reynolds called annotated PowerPoint decks in place of documents �slideuments�, which he called the �illegitimate offspring of the projected slide and the written document.�While Reynolds was critical, Duarte wants to legitimize the format by rebranding it as a �slidedoc.�

Duarte believes that the traditional document is dead (except for a few niche cases), and PowerPoint has won. She argues that PowerPoint is already used for so many purposes besides slides, and that it integrates visuals and text so much better than other tools, we should use it for much routine communication within business.

Why do I bring this up on the poster blog? Because on at least one count, Duarte is right. As I�ve mentioned many times before, PowerPoint is the most commonly used software for making conference posters. I still contend that is is not a great tool for this, yet there are just too many people who know no other way, and won�t put in the effort to buy or learn new software.

Thus, the tasks that Duarte talks about in creating a slidedoc are the same steps you need to go through in creating a conference poster.

The nitty gritty for people making a conference poster begins in section 2 (slide 37), discussing the process of creating appropriate text. This is something that I haven�t given a lot of attention to on this blog, so if you�ve been looking for a discussion of that, this is a good place to start.

Section 3 (page 99) is hits closer to the sort of topics normally featured on this blog: graphic design. It talks about creating a consistent �visual language� (slide 102), the use of grids (slide 116) and white space (slide 121), and good ideas for using text (slide 127).

Section 4 is less relevant to poster creators, as it looks at how to present slidedocs. We know how posters are presented (print, carry, hang, stand and chat), and it�s not the same way that slide decks, or slidedocs, are.

Slidedoc is a self-exemplifying book. It clearly has the look of a PowerPoint deck, just one done about 1,000% better than most decks you have ever seen. It took a lot of careful effort to get it to look that good, and the same will be true of posters, too.

Making this book free is a wonderful gift from Duarte. Check it out.

External links

Slidedocs
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