flynn0013

I’ve seen a few creative re-uses of fabric posters before, but Rolf Hut is the new champion of poster recycling. I think Clicking to enlarge is mandatory to appreciate this in its full spendour. This Netherlands site also promises to allow you to re-use your poster in equally creative ways. Hat tip to Elizabeth Sandquist. Hanna Isolatus ran a poll on Twitter that is relevant to the interests of this blog! Justify the text on a poster, or ragged right? With just a 2% difference, clearly the battle is set to rage on. I personally have no strong preference for a poster. Vivid Biology is a Twitter account from a scientific illustration studio of the same name that brings a strong graphics sensibility to illustrating biological facts. The approach that they bring is one that would work well for posters, too. Hat tip to Dan Tracy.

Today’s contributor is Jodene Pappas. This poster is a bit of a break from the usual natural science that we see here on the blog, for which I am grateful. Click to enlarge! My computer was not able to import the font correctly for the makeover I am about to show you. So the text does not quite represent what the author intended. But I wasn’t focused on the text, anyway. No, I want to talk about those arrows. Arrows generally represent not only a failure of design, but a public admission of that failure. It says, “I know I screwed up, and that the order doesn’t follow the normal reading rules.” The ethos of this blog, though, is to make things better. This means you work with what you have, and not always throw away the existing style. My first concern is that the arrows are darker than almost everything else on the page. And the dark blue fill isn’t represented anywhere else on the eposter. This makes them stand out optically more than almost everything else on the page. The first st...

Today’s poster comes to us courtesy of Catherine Chen, who was kind enough to share. Click to enlarge! Catherine supplied this in an editable file, so the easiest way to go through this critique is to show how this poster could change. The first thing that jumped out when I opened up the file is that title area. The longer I write this blog, the more interested I am in the titles of posters and how they are presented. Titles are just critically important. As I wrote last week (and before), nothing should compete with the title. Here, your eye is drawn to that big blue band running across the top, and not the title. It is arguably the most optically dominant thing on the entire poster. I kind of like the idea of the bar as a separator, but it needs to be smaller, opening up the space around the title. In addition to shrinking the bar,  I made other, less obvious tweaks. I shortened up the institutional addresses. Will anyone need a zip code while viewing a poster? Rather than footn...

Today’s poster comes from Anthony Biduck. Click to enlarge! This poster is unusual, because there are not graphic elements here. There is only text. This poses a challenge, because text blocks are not terribly visually appealing. The good news is that the typesetting is clean. There poster is written in sentences and paragraphs. There is not an over reliance on bullets, with the couple of numbered lists making sense. I personally would prefer to have zeroes before the decimals in the results (that is, -0.36 instead of -.36) and conclusions (that is, 0.07 rather than .07). I results in the table are listed in order of “strongest correlation to weakest correlation.” That some correlations are positive and some are negative confuses the ordering. Instead of the raw correlation, r , an alternative might be to use r 2 . This value is often reported, because it explains how much of the variation is explained by the factor at hand. It also happens to make all the values in the table positive....

My last link roundup came out just before this year’s Academy Awards, which featured an ill-fated announcement of announcing the wrong winner. This article argues that the card design could have been much better and possibly avoided that memorable but embarassing moment. That’s horrible typography. I will emphasize that again: horrible. Or, to be nicer, not good. Look at it again. Of course anyone could’ve made the same honest error! The words “Best Actress” are on there  —  at the very bottom  —  in small print. You are on television with millions of people around the world watching. You are a little nervous, and you have to read a card. You will most likely read it from top to bottom without questioning whether the card is right. ... Here’s what should’ve been changed based on the three critiques I just made: The logo doesn’t need to be at the top of this card. Everyone knows it’s the Oscars. We move the Oscars logo to the bottom where it’s least important in this context. The ...

Today’s poster comes from Anjali Sharma. It is being presented at the Energy For Society conference in April. Click to enlarge! It’s... square. This is interesting, because I don’t see many square posters here on the blog. Something you may not see (depending on browser settings and such) is that this poster has a wide margin. Margins are very undervalued on many posters, and the margin helps give this poster some lightness. I’m having a hard time moving past the title. Those letters touching the top of the box are just killing me. There is room to center the text better vertically, since none of the bottom descenders (the lower case Gs) are threatening to touch the bottom of the red box. The lines around the columns are not heavy handed. They are light and well placed far from the text, so they add some visual interest rather than feeling like an attempt shoehorn too much content into too little space. But I always like to see what a poster looks like without boxes. Speaking of line...

Today’s contribution is an award winning poster from Ryan Gilchrist. Click to enlarge! Ryan writes: My aim here was to balance on the fence between a poster and an infographic, and try to convey some complex physics in an intuitive manner. My concern is that there isn’t enough information on the poster to keep the reader interested. Additionally, I’ve been trying to find an alternative colour scheme than ‘sideways traffic light’, but haven’t had much success yet! This poster would definitely stand out at a typical conference. It makes a strong statement visually, with its big blocks of colours, curved lines, and slightly low fi images. It looks different than most posters you see at academic conferences, generally in a good way. There are a few changes that I might try, although I’m not convinced I would implement them. I’d try seeing how the central headings (“Subsurface spill dynamics”) would look if placed horizontally instead of at an angle. I appreciate that a little use o...