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Matthew wins for best poster design cartoon this month: You can see more of his cartoons at Errant Science . His inspiration for this one? Just looked at a draft of a poster, there was text in size 2 point… Just to drive the point home, let me say: Writing text in a 2 point font on a poster is dumb. Do not do that. James Hamblin, writing for The Atlantic , has a fascinating article about using colour to increase the readbility of text . Here’s an example, where colour is used as a cue to tell you what the next line is: This specific example is from a company called BeeLine . They have plugins for Chrome for the web and PDFs. Here’s this blog viewed in Beeline: I haven’t had success with reading my PDF reprints in BeeLine colour yet. The Atlantic article suggests there are many more possibilities to improve the reading experience beyond what we have learned from the printed page. I would not recommend trying it for a poster quite yet, because the unfamiliarity might be confusing or

“What’s the smallest point size you can put on a poster?” This is a common question, but it’s not one that has a simple answer. I know many scientists read this blog, and scientists work in a world where measurements are universal. 37°C is 37°C no matter wherever you are, whatever you’re measuring, and are exactly comparable. Someone from a scientific background probably thinks that two identical pieces of text – in different fonts but the same point size – should take up the same space. I have bad news. Point size does not work like that. These two paragraphs are both set in serif typefaces, both nominally 16 points in size, but one takes 19% more column length than the other. This difference can arise because individual letters in the two fonts might have the same height, but different widths. The letter O may be a wider circle, or a narrower oval, for example. That 19% will make a big difference in your layout, even if the two blocks of text are similarly readable. I have selected

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 ma

Colour on a poster is powerful, but can be difficult to use well. One of the problems I often see is that people create posters with deep, bright, saturated colours that cover large areas: It’s hard to get the full effect of this on a small computer screen, but those bright colours on a poster that several feet wide can be like a punch in the eyes. Size signals importance. So do bright colours. The combination of both can be overwhelming and is rarely necessary. The larger the surface area you colour, the less you have to do for it to “read” as a distinct colour. You can go to a very light, almost pastel shade, and it will still come across as clearly distinct from a background or other colours. People can readily tell that you’ve highlighted something in blue. If you have something that is very small like a select point of data on a graph, or something for emphasis – that’s the place where you can use those bright, intense colours to draw attention. Subtlety won’t cut it if something