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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.

Kamis, 17 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Let anarchy reign! - Si Bejo Science

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Sometimes, people tell me, �I can�t follow the advice you have in the blog. There�s an institutional poster template, and they make me use it.�

My first reaction is usually, �Who will stop you?�

Who is the person who is going to make sure that you�ve followed your university style guide and haven�t used the wrong shade of blue in the Pantone matching system?

Who is the person who is going to watch over your shoulder as you sit at your computer designing the poster, proof the poster when it comes back from the printer, and then follow you the conference?

I have not heard of anyone who suffered any consequences for not using a university poster template. I can imagine an administrator harrumphing, but that�s about it.

But for the sake of argument, let�s imagine that there is such a person. Let�s imagine there is someone who designates themselves as the poster police for an institution.


Swallow your pride and use the institutional template. Slap in the text and graphs. Try to make it competent, make it acceptable, but don�t pour any more time into it than you absolutely need to.

Meanwhile...

Make a second poster. Make the poster that you want to make. Make a poster where you get to make the design choices that are appropriate to your material, not your University Marketing and Communications department.

Roll both posters into your poster tube. Put the institutionally approved poster up in the designated poster slot. There. Now you have complied with the guidelines, and you won�t get into trouble.

In pretty much every conference I�ve ever been to, there are a few empty poster boards somewhere. Around the edges. In the back. They are probably not in areas with high foot traffic.

Hang up the poster you wanted to make in one of those unused spots. Then sit back and see what kind of reactions the two posters get from conference goers.

Let anarchy reign!

Updated, 18 March 2016: This is not a hypothetical situation.

Related posts

Misplaced priorities on institutional templates

External links

The question isn�t who is going to let me, it�s who is going to stop me

Kamis, 10 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Worst poster viewer - Si Bejo Science

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�I don�t have a question so much as a comment...�

Dave Levitan at Slate looks at the phenomenon of why people use question time at the end of presentations to not ask questions.

 �My question is the following statement� is the bane of any sane conference-goer�s existence. Any conference, panel, lecture, seminar, symposium, and so on, in any possible field you can imagine, can be the setting for this crime against humanity. The tendency of audience members to stand up and speechify rather than simply ask is remarkably widespread?�?anecdotally, everyone I know says they see it all the time, and everyone says they hate it.

There�s no single, simple answer why people do this, but it got me wondering: is there an equivalent behaviour in a poster session?

Oral presentations are designed to be a one time spiel by one speaker to many audience members, but a poster is designed to be shown many times to a small audience that comes and goes. An oral talk rarely offers the the opportunity for dialogue that a poster presentation does.

But in both formats, some audience members who will listen quietly while the presenter speaks. A few will interject questions as the talk goes along.

I can�t remember any time in a poster presentation where someone who I did not know wandered up to my poster and just made statements about unrelated things that had nothing to do with the poster.

I do realize, however, that my experience is limited. I�m a pretty tall, old guy, which can have the effect of filtering out a lot of interactions from other conference goers.

Has anyone encountered the �My question is the following statement� behaviour at a poster presentation? If not, what is the most annoying thing that a poster viewer has done to you in a poster presentation?

I think mine might be the poster viewer who just won�t leave.

Update: Here are answers to #WorstPosterViewer from Twitter:


External links

My Question Is the Following Statement

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

Selasa, 01 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Lucky seven! - Si Bejo Science

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This blog began seven years ago today. And it�s still one of my favourite projects. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.

Picture by Lee Bryan on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Kamis, 25 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Link roundup for February 2016 - Si Bejo Science

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I often use highways signs as metaphors for conference posters. This article describes the typeface selection for highways signs in the United States, and the decision to return to an older (possibly inferior) typeface. Hat tip to Amanda Krauss.

Speaking of highways signs, here�s how they might look if designed by academics:



Photo from Dan Taber at the recent AAAS meeting. Hat tip to Jamie Vernon.

The National Science Foundation has announced the winners of the annual visualization challenge, the Vizzies.



There are some nice ones there. I think this baldderwort image is close to the sweet spot for an academic conference poster.

What is it about pie charts that bring out the worst in design?



Vice magazine should know better than to make the thing above. Hat tip to Arthur Charpentier and Dawn Bazely.

Lenny Teytelman caught this rebellious moment:


There�s a longer post about the often confusing social media policies of research conferences here.

I just learned of Jane Richardson, who created a now standard way of drawing protein structure. Computers do it now, but her hand drawings are so lovely:


It�s a lovely example of how you have to think deeply about something to create a good graphic, but that good graphic can clarify so much for so many. Here�s a blog post and an interview with Richardson. She says:

Producing a good image is always a lot of work, making a single illustration that shows a point really well is always a challenge.

I still have to review Ellen Lupton�s How Posters Work, darn it. Meanwhile, here�s a summary of the book.

A list of logos that make good use of negative space. I do hope the UTRGV Vaquero starts making those lists one day.

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.
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