flynn0013

Starting off this month with a “Done in one” advice article on poster design by Tullio Rossi. I disagree with a few very minor points (bullet points are not your friend ), but overall very good! Hat tip to Anna Clemens .  • • • • • A five tweet thread from Tolpa Studies from the recent Twitter conference, #BTCon18, about visual literacy.  • • • • • This guide on making graphs more readable is very good. One of the key things in this graph makeover and why it works is the designer listened to what the scientists said about it . They used the expertise to defined the graph’s “talking points”, so to speak. Hat tip to Garr Reynolds.  • • • • • I recommend against tables on posters almost always. But if you must have a table, make it a nice table. This is a nice animated makeover of a table by Joey Cherderchuk from Dark Horse Analytics. Hat tip to Catherine Crompton  • • • • • Picture in Portal is a course for making scientific graphics. Hat tip to B. Haas .   • • • • • Lauren Oldac

A colleague of mine was at the 9th Bird Working Group Meeting, The archaeology of human-bird interactions . He snapped a pic of a poster by Beatrice Demarchi which he thought would interest me. It did. I contacted Bea... who thought I was punking her. I almost binned the message thinking that it was a joke then I figured that it must have been real as not many people know about the Bird Working Group! :) She was nice enough to send along a better version of the poster. Click to enlarge! I love the clarity and simplicity of vision here. I love how text and visuals, instead of being two separate elements, are fused into one element. The words are the picture. I was impressed, because I had tried to design something similar – text forming the outline of a shape – for a t-shirt. I was not able to make the text fit the shape anywhere near as well as Bea did. She explained how she did it (lightly edited): I popped an image of the bird into Adobe Illustrator, and then text that sort

Today’s poster is contributed by Bayo Adeniji. Click to enlarge! Bayo wrote (lightly edited): Can you spot the influence of the Better Posters blog in the poster? I hoped to create a poster that was uncluttered and which had a clear message devoid of management theory jargon. My PhD is multi-disciplinary, and I’m learning to straddle the divide so I don’t alienate either fields. My worry though, is the issue of oversimplification. I replied: I think “oversimplification” is a worry too many people have. It's the kind of thing that makes undergraduates reach for a thesaurus when writing essays, n the mistaken belief longer, rarer words make them sound smarter. They are judged less intelligent by readers when they do that. Simple does not mean stupid. While Bayo was nice enough to say this blog influenced the poster, I never would have made a poster that looks like this. It’s very much Bayo’s own creation. I’ve talked before about using circles to break up the monotony of rectangl

Asad Sayeed nominated this poster for a design award. You really need to click to enlarge this one to appreciate it: You can see it in pieces in first author Gavin Abercrombie’s Twitter feed . “Lessons from comics” is something of a recurring theme on this blog . And I’ve featured posters that used the vocabulary of comics before, but this might be one of the best examples I’ve seen. The poster makes the “row by row” reading order clear because the panel heights are all identical, so there is a straight horizontal gutter marking out each row. The panel widths vary, so there is no white gutter running down the page that suggests “columns” to your eyes. The one area where I would try a few things differently is the title. I’d use one typeface for the title instead of two. The two styles are just similar enough that the combination looks like it could be a mistake instead of a choice. I’d also like to see the looser, freehand style used through the rest of the poster reflected in th