Critique: Dynamic relationships (of amino acids)

Inna Nikonorova is today’s kindly contributor, who let me share this on the blog. Click to enlarge!

The poster is clear and readable, but I do think it could be improved.

I like that the Introduction tries to provide a more organic look to some of the headings and images in it. But if you’re going to go that route, you have to commit to it. That weathered look isn’t anywhere else on the poster, so it looks a little odd. I would remove it to make the weathered paper and blackboard and the like to make the Introduction visually consistent with the rest of the poster. Of course, you could go the other way, and make the entire poster look more antique, but giving the rest of the poster that blackboard appearance will be harder and take longer.

I would generally try to widen the margins between the text and the boxes they are in. It looks like this is only have a fraction of an inch between text and line in some places. It’s particularly noticeable in the Literature Cited section.

Speaking of the Literature Cited, it is left aligned, as is the rest of the text in the poster. But because the text is so dense in the Lit Cited section, it makes the centered text in the Acknowledgements stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.

The INSPIRE logo isn’t centered in its box. Neither is the Rutgers logo, come to think of it, but because the Rutgers logo is an irregular shape, it’s less noticeable.

The mouse in the Methods might be flipped so it’s facing in, not out.

Related posts

Look into the poster: Gaze and graphics

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: Life in the cold

Max Showalter had the worst possible poster experience. The thing we all dread. Max wrote: I recently presented this poster at a large conference and of the thousands of people walking by literally no one stopped to look at my poster. Ignoring that could just be me (I thought I was charming!), could you provide some feedback on what aspects of the poster might be telling people “keep walking”? Ouch. I feel for you, Max. What happened? Let’s have a look at Max’s poster, which he gave at the 2017 Association for the Science of Limnology and Oceanography “Aquatic Sciences” meeting . Click to enlarge! Max’s poster is far from the worst I’ve seen. The layout is clean and the colours are attractive. Why didn’t it find an audience? As journalists say, this poster “buries the lede.” I think the issue is there is no clear entry point. For starters, the title is maybe a little small, and what it says is not helpful to me. I know what “low temperature” and “taxis” are. But I do not know ...

publisher tips

Search This Blog