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Last week , I showed a sweet poster from Desi Quintans . Desi added a great question in his email that I thought deserved its own blog post: I noticed that the posters that did well in real life were made with strong, almost gaudy colours. In particular, the ones with very large blocks of strong colour were quickly noticed compared to the understated ones like mine. How can one walk the line between elegant design and the reality of grabbing a person's attention in a room that's already visually and aurally noisy? Let’s look as Desi’s poster again, just for context. Click to enlarge! Desi calls this poster “understated,” which is an apt description. As I wrote last week , I like this power a lot, but I think Desi’s description is apt. You might also call it subtle. What are the characteristics that give it that look? (Click to enlarge.) A lot has to do with the colour scheme. There are a lot of earthy tones, particularly up in the title. Even when using primary colours in ...

Most of the time, I think my poster aesthetic might be described as Swiss style. That’s the period that saw the creation of Helvetica, for instance. It’s a style that is very spare and very organized , with lots of emphasis on grids. You can see it in this poster I made for the American Society for Parasitologists meeting in 2014. Click to enlarge! This was a noble, but in my mind, failed experiment. I wanted someone to get the main point of the poster by reading across the top row. I wanted people to get the supporting details in each column. It kind of works, kind of doesn’t. The top row works best because it is all photos. The graphics in the rows below that are not consistent enough to make the idea work. The text block in the bottom right doesn’t follow through with the lines established in the two rows above, and the three images to the left of it. I still like using huge numbers to bring home the main difference in infection rates between the two species instead of a graph. Si...

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...