flynn0013

Last week, I talked about the difference between gaudy and bold . Stacy Shield provides two examples of going bold in poster design. Click to enlarge! Red, black, and white. Talk about a striking choice of colours. The limited colour palette gives this poster an almost “ duotone ” look: It wouldn’t look out of place at a White Stripes concert: Another poster from Stacy again showcases her strong sense of colour. Stacy’s posters are not based on the same template, but are recognizably by the same person. It shows that you can develop a distinctive personal style in creating posters. The colours are so strong and vibrant that they leap out at you. But they are selected carefully. There are not many colours; just three carefully chosen ones. They don’t look like an“all over the place” clash that can make a poster look gaudy. I would like to see that same discipline that is brought to the colour choices also brought to the content. These posters feature a lot of text and small graphics. T...

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...

Wearing black make you cool. Everybody knows that. But while black on black makes an awesome fashion statement, it is a terrible communication statement. I saw a poster earlier this year that had its title – the thing that is the only thing most people at a conference will see about your poster – in this colour scheme: dark green text on black. Rather than posting a picture of the poster itself, I used the eyedropper tool to copy the colours from a picture I took of it on the board. Keep in mind that the colours you see might vary, depending on how the image is positioned on your screen. But I doubt anyone will look at that and think that colour combination makes for easy scanning. Let’s put the same dark green text over the black, as it was on the poster, and white for comparison: You have to enlarge and squint to read that text over the black background. The white background makes the text almost infinitely easier to read. The authors of this particular poster weren’t done, though. T...

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...