Visual density

Your blogger is extra busy this week, and only has time to steal this cartoon from Red Pen / Black Pen on Twitter. Click to enlarge!

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Critique: Keep the home fire burning

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Today’s contribution is a prize-winning poster from Alexandra Lai! This was presented at the International Aerosol Conference . Click to enlarge! The title bar is particularly well done. It’s an excellent example of a clear visual hierarchy: the title is biggest and in bold. A subtitle is big, but not bold. The authors are smaller, and the affiliations are smaller yet. And the type is fits the space, so there isn’t a lot of empty space on the right corner. The colour scheme is a little busy, but generally works. The main oranges in the title and callout boxes and blue in the background are contrast colours. The colurs in the graphs might benefit from being a little more harmonized with the two main colours. Some of the greens and pinks don’t seem to fit that well. Alexnadra has done a good job with the typography here. The font is clean, the emphasis is clear, and the table is not a mess of lines. In the Methods, I might like to see fewer words, but the words are set out in a very rea...
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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 ...
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Critique: Neutrino topology

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