Link round-up for July 2016

Here’s the level of “attention to detail” that anyone who designs should aspire to:

This makeover from Rian Hughes is shown here. His website is well worth checking out. Hat tip to John Wick.

Titles matter. This article analyzes what titles of scientific articles get social media buzz. Funny titles don’t help. But making positive, definite statements about the results does. These data support the Columbo principle for writing titles: Show the murder. Make the audience wonder, “How can you prove it?” instead of “Whodunnit?” Hat tip to Neuroskeptic.

If you are conference organizer, one of your main goals should be encouraging interaction with students and more senior people. Andrew Thaler reports on a solution pioneered by the International Marine Conservation Congress:

Giving the only drink tickets to the students to hand out during poster presentations is a brilliant move.

One of my bugbears is how often people use idiosyncratic abbreviations and acronyms. I’ll let you have DNA, but otherwise, you’re almost always better off if you write words. The UK Government agrees:

Terms like eg, ie and etc, while common, make reading difficult for some.
Anyone who didn’t grow up speaking English may not be familiar with them. Even those with high literacy levels can be thrown if they are reading under stress or are in a hurry - like a lot of people are on the web.

Nature has an article looking at biological visualizations.

Scott Barinato’s new book is called Good Charts.

Nancy Duarte interviews him here.

I sympathize with this note from Taking Apart Cats:

“Hm. poster is very busy. Will check later” *completely unable to find poster again*

What to wear, what to wear... If you don’t know, you’ll be pleased to know that Errant Science says you’re far from alone:

My theory is that everyone is basically confused at what to wear for conferences and so the end result is a mish-mash of different levels of smartness.

Comments

Scott McCloud’s “Big triangle” and poster design

Posters are a visual medium. But not everything is equally visual. A picture of a real object is very visual, and the best thing to have on a poster. A scatter plot is less visual. And text is the least of all. I was thinking about how I might make that point, um, visually, and I suddenly realized that I was just recreating one side of Scott McCloud ’s triangle from Understanding Comics . If you have not read Understanding Comics ... oh, how I envy you. You have that to look forward to. It is a wonderful book. Even if you are the sort who thinks, “Ugh, superheroes,” get over it, read this damn book, and have your consciousness expanded. It is an undisputed classic book. Here’s a except relevant to the matter at hand: And that’s the point I was trying to make, except McCloud did it better over twenty years ago. Received information is immediate; perceived information takes effort. This is why nobody likes posters with too much writing. It takes effort that, in a busy conference settin...

Reading gravity

Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ. I recently learned that something I’ve called “ the Cosmo principle ” on this blog is an actual thing that proper designers talk about, except they have a different name for it. They call it “reading gravity.” The picture above is sometimes called a “Gutenberg diagram.” Apparently it was given that name by newspaper designer Edmond Arnold (interviewed here , where he refers to the “Gutenberg principle”). I’m not completely sure about this; need to do some more reading. What this image calls the “primary optical area,” I’ve usually called the “sex story,” because that’s invariably what occupies that position on every cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. The “terminal area” is usually what I’ve called the “take home message.” What I find usually ends up in the lower left corner, or “weak fallow area” as its called here, are my methods section. And that’s fine, because those are usually only of interest to the afficiandos. This diagram is wort...

Critique and makeover: Buffer it out

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...

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