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Today's poster is a contribution from William Elaban. This was not for a conference, but a class. Click to enlarge! Now, I have to apologize to William here, because my first reaction to this poster is not a kind one. But sometimes, my first reaction to a poster is: “Blow it up. Blow it all up. Blow it all up and start again.” This poster has deep structural issues. There is too much text. The reading order is all over the place. When the problems are that big, you want to see a fresh page. But first impressions can lie. Then I calm down and start tinkering. And by following some of the usual design principles, the poster slowly but steadily gets better. The first thing I did was get rid of lines. Underlined text and boxes were immediately banished. Headline case was replaced with sentence case. Next, I tackled the table. I gave it a more standard format, with just horizontal lines separating the top, header, and bottom. I cut the large number of decimal places down to a more reas...

Today’s poster comes from kindly contributor Emma Taylor, who was generous enough to share her honours project. Click to enlarge! Quick thoughts. Good structure that lets me know I read in rows. Visual hierarchy is generally good. Looks crowded. Would benefit from more space around everything, but particularly between text and edged of blue boxes they are in. Underlining text in discussion would probably be better as bold or italic text. Another editing run to cut more text might help. (I know, that bit is hard .)

This blog mostly uses sciences as examples, so I am always positively delighted when I get contributions from the humanities. Today’s contribution is from Cornelius van Lit . Click to enlarge! One of the things like about getting other people’s posters is they try stuff I would never do. I’d never put my title in the middle of the poster. And yet, it works here. The poster is a great example use of using size to indicate reading priority. That large text in the middle makes it very clear where you are supposed to start reading. Nothing competes with that title. The downside of having the title in the middle is that there is some potential confusion about how you are supposed to read the remaining text. But it’s okay here. After reading the middle introduction, people will jump up to the upper left corner (which starts “Scholars use digitized manuscripts...”) because that’s just where you look first when you read English. After reading that section, I think most people will read across...

No, I haven’t gone full Tolkien this week. Mediterranean means “Middle of the Earth,” right? This week’s poster about the Mediterranean Sea comes from kindly contributor Francisco Pastor. Click to enlarge! Francisco is a repeat customer of this blog. One of his earlier poster was reviewed here last year , but this iteration is in Spanish. One of the things I like about graphic design is that you don’t always need to be able to understand the exact language to be able to offer advice! (Though I’m not sure what I would make of a poster in Korean or Hindi.) Francisco’s aims were to “increase importance for graphical info and reduce text. I also tried to highlight conclusion sections and added a screenshot to publish our sea surface temperature website.” Compared to the previous poster, I think this version is more successful at meeting those goals. The images are bigger and the take home message is more obvious and cleaner. But some problems that were in the previous poster are still cree...

Today’s contribution comes from Parisa Mehran, PhD student at Osaka University. This poster was presented at EUROCALL2018 , but talks a lot about what went down at EUROCALL2017 . You can read that story here , but as for the poster itself? Click to enlarge! The upper left side is blank on purpose to hold some documents that Parisa clipped to the poster. You can see this in her picture below, from her Facebook post about this: The poster’s biggest successes are the organization and the colours. The poster is clearly meant to be read in rows. Using gray bars to separate elements within rows means that the break between them is less conspicuous than the black bars between rows, so your eyes group the rows together. Yellow has the advantage of being a bright colour that is naturally light enough that you can readily read black text on top of it. The boldness of colour fits with the boldness of the thick sans serif type. I like the type choice here so much that I wish it was used througho...

Today’s contributor is A.Z. Andis , who is sharing an award-winning poster presented at Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Click to enlarge! This won the Victor Hutchinson Outstanding Poster award in the most popular category! What leaps (no frog pun intended) out at you with this poster is the discipline in the colour palette. We are using black, and we are using green, the text is white, and you will like it ! This brings so much cohesion to the poster. The first section of the poster (“Introduction”) is placed further right than the second section (“Experiment”), which violates our normal reading expectation. But at least readers get warned of this, because the sections are numbered. The varying widths of the text and images takes away a little of the cleanliness of the layout. Visually, it is unclear if the box with the white background belongs to the “Experiment” section or the “Results” section. The rotation of words is an interesting way of emphasizing key wo...

Today’s poster comes from Jennifer Pannell. Click to enlarge! Before I get into some details, Jennifer noted that this poster isn’t exactly the way she wanted it to look: I had some problems with the font, though. Scribus won’t embed them and so they look terrible unless you zoom in 100%, so it might look terrible as a png. I don’t know if the export problem might explain a few little issues, like dumb quotes instead of curly quotes. Or that there are lines after paragraphs on the left, but not the bottom right. “Fig” should probably have a period after it throughout. Jennifer’s poster has a clear two column format, with some attractive graphics to bring the casual browsers on board. There are some positioning choices I find odd, though. There is more open space on this poster than many I see, which is good, yet somehow items still seem to end up feeling crammed together. For example, here’s a close up on the upper right corner: There is open space around the images of the bird, and th...

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...

Today’s poster comes courtesy of contributor Carolyn Bauer. Her work has been featured before , and I’m pleased she liked the experience enough to come back for seconds! Click to enlarge this poster that was recently presented at the International Congress of Neuroendocrinology ! I like this. The illustration on the right is an approachable entry point. I also like the columns, one for each hypothesis. What I wasn’t as crazy about was the title area. Two lines for the title and three for the authors was chewing up a lot of space than it needed. I changed the all capital names to regular letters, and dropped a lot of department affiliations and cities that I honestly think nobody cares about. Some of my other revisions were my most common ones: to open up the margins, both around the border and between elements. In the revision below, there’s at least an inch around the edge. I continued along with a few other changes. One of the things that bugged me was the birds are all facing to the...

Andrzej Zielezinski‏ was proud of this poster , made entirely in the freeware package Inkscape. Impressive to me, because I struggled with Inkscape . Click to enlarge! One of the most interesting aspects of the poster is the diagrams on the diagonal. As Ellen Lupton notes in the book How Posters Work , many great posters use diagonals to bring action and life into a design. Here’s how Andrzej did it: I drew all 5 main elements (home page, 2 diagrams, ROC curves and navigation) in 2D. The image showing a guy on the mountain was also pasted in 2D. Then I skewed each element -63* horizontally and -27* vertically (Inkscape menu - Object - Transform - Skew). Shadows are just skewed and black rectangulars with some transparency (RGBA: 42424248) and blur set to 2.7. An issue with that diagonal, though, is that because the figure reaches up into the upper right corner, the title can’t reach over into that space. So the title seems a little small to me. And when the title is 90% of your commun...

Adam Stone was kind enough to share this poster from the Third International Conference on Sign Language Acquisition in Istanbul, Turkey. You’ll definitely want to click to enlarge this one! This is the second comics-inspired poster in as many month (the first was here ). I was a little caught off guard when I read there was a connection between them, as Adam explained: I was inspired by this tweet by my colleague who saw a comic-inspired poster at LREC . So this poster is a direct descendant of the one featured on the blog last month! Adam continues with how he made the poster (lightly edited). I love xkcd so I went with that. I used vectormagic.com to vectorize the stick figures so I could resize them easily. It’ll be nice to have a graphics tablet to draw more fine-tuned artwork instead of hacking it out in PowerPoint. I added eyes to them because my postdoc supervisor and co-author Rain said, “These are deaf people, right? And it’s about eye tracking, so the characters should ha...

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...

Today’s poster is from Leonardo Uieda. This was presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting last year. Click to enlarge! Leonardo explains: It’s about a software project I’m working on and not really about research results. That’s why it has no results figures (though the background of the poster was generated by the first code block on the right, so it serves as a kind of result). The message I was trying to get across is: “We’re building this thing. This is what we currently have. Come help us!” It’s always tough to have a poster that is just text. I might have tried to bring some element of the map off the background and somewhere into the foreground. The subtlety of the background enhances the legibility of the text, but at a glance, I can’t see anything that says, “maps.” Leonardo continues: I expect that my main talking points during the presentation will be around the code. Each line was put there so that it would represent an idea in our design and why we think it...

Today’s poster is from kindly contributor Jessica von der Meden. Click to enlarge! One of the most distinctive features of this poster is that there’s a title, or perhaps a subtitle, running down the right hand side. I’ve often toyed with the idea of placing a title on the side of a poster rather than the top, but have always chickened out. I imagined that on a wider than tall landscape style poster, not a portrait style poster, which gets turned sideways to fit. I like the sideways title for its style, but it’s impractical to read. The main body of the poster has six boxes, with white lines around each one. The white lines are, luckily, thin, so they are not as obtrusive as I’ve sometimes seen. But the boxes would benefit from having more space, and more consistent space, around them. The horizontal margins between left and right boxes are wider than the horizontal margins between up and down boxes, for instance. For a second, I thought I would try cutting those six boxes down to t...

Today’s poster is about the Capricorn Experiment, not to be confused with the 1970s conspiracy movie, Capricorn One : The only conspiracy in the new poster, from Vidhi Bharti at Monash University in Melbourne, is the justification for “Capricorn”. It’s supposed to be an abbreviation for, “Clouds, Aerosols, Precipitation, Radiation, and Atmospheric Composition Over the Southern Ocean.” The experiment should really be “Capracoso.” I mean, you just don’t get to make abbreviations out of any letter somewhere in the word! It would be like abbreviating the Univ e rsity of Te x as Ri o Gra n de Vall e y as “EXONE”. But I digress. Let’s look at the poster, which you can click to enlarge! Vidhi wrote: I work on boundary layer meteorology, which basically deals with a lot of mathematical equations and unattractive diagrams. Therefore, presenting it all in an attractive package is a big challenge. Vidhi does a good job of rising to that challenge with this poster. I like the way this poster tack...

Today’s poster comes to us courtesy of Mi Tian. Click to enlarge! The individual blocks (like “Background” and “Research goals”) are good. I like the colour choices and the “pins” by the headings as graphic elements. The arrangement of the blocks on the page is not as good. The reading order is confusing. The little lines to the pins, plus the height on the page (i.e., closest to title), suggest I’m supposed to start with “Research goals”. But normal reading order would suggest I start with “Background.” I’d try flipping “Summary” and “Acknowledgements”, which would place those two blocks in positions that are more typical of where those are usually placed. The poster feels very crowded. Tons of elements are almost touching each other. The “Summary” heading is almost touching the edge of the blue box its in. The pin by “Introduction” is almost touching the graph above. All the logos down in the corner are almost touching each other. The “Applications” heading pokes up higher than the t...

Today’s contribution comes from Melvin Noé González . It was presented at an RNA meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Click to enlarge! He writes: Through the years I experimented with various templates for poster presentation, and I’m proud to say I’m really happy with how this one turned out. As you will find, I used a piece of advice you mentioned in one of your posts regarding a short summary section — and people loved it! I was approached by several people just because they thought the layout was cool, even though I wasn’t related to their research. I’m always glad to have feedback that advice works! The title bar works well, by presenting everything cleanly. The logo is sensibly over to one side, and blends into the background. The authors names are prominent, with institution and contact information legible, but low key. This poster is well organized, which helps walk you though what is maybe a little too much material. The numbers by each heading ensure you don’t ...

When I wander through department hallways and professor offices, I often see posters like this, from Rottner and colleagues (2017; tweeted by journal here ). Click to enlarge! These sort of posters often feature cellular processes or biochemical pathways. They are often professionally done, attractive, and valuable teaching tools. But they are not good examples that conference poster makers should be trying to imitate. A poster like this is meant for experts, so presumes a high level of knowledge. It is intended to be something you can look at for days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. They can show lots of fiddly little details that you can discover over that long period of time. In a conference poster session, you have a few minutes for someone to absorb the work, not months. You can’t stuff in the same level of detail in conference poster that you can in a lab poster. Hat tip to Prachee Avasthi . Reference Rottner K, Faix J, B...