Critique: Neutrino topology

Physics is not the best represented academic field on this blog, so I was pleased to get this submission from Paola Ferrario, who was kind enough to share this with readers of the blog. Click to enlarge!

I like many things about this poster.

The typography is clean.
The big central circle attracts the eye and breaks up the monotony of rectangles.
There aren’t a huge number of words.
The margins between all the elements are comfortable.
There are pictures of real objects.
Logos are mostly kept down in the inf print section.
There is a good use of bright colours to highlight headings.

I have one major problem. I know where to start reading the poster. I know where I should end up when I finish reading the poster. What I am supposed to do between those two points is completely baffling to me.

The text in that big central circle is particularly baffling. That it is set against a different shape and colour provides a visual cue that suggests it isn’t part of the main text. It looks like a “callout” that you are either supposed to read first, or that might be an aside that you can dispense with altogether.

One way that might improve the reader’s plight without restructuring the entire poster is to be explicit about what order the sections are supposed to go in. Here, I’ve added some numbered bullets to sit next to each heading. I used the eyedropper tool to match the colour. I was not sure what the typeface on the poster is, so I used sans serif numbers from Erler Dingbats

Adding the numbers the quick way I did means the headings are not centered correctly. And this may not be the exact order Paola intended, but those concerns are easily fixed if you have the original file to tinker with.

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Better Posters Twitter account temporarily down

The automated Twitter feed for this blog (@Better_Posters) is currently down. I had logged in to make a few cosmetic changes to the feed. When I did, I was prompted to add a birthday, so I picked the day the blog went live. Little did I know that since this was ten years ago, it didn’t meet Twitter’s minimum age requirement of 13. This instantly got the account locked. I have put in a service ticket, and will post here when the feed is back.

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...

Link roundup for October 2016

Contrast matters, and web page designers are starting to forget that . Kevin Marks delves into how grey text is becoming so prominent on the web. Marks notes something I’ve talked about before: the difference between the screen and a poster handing on a wall. (W)hen you design in perfect settings, with big, contrast-rich monitors, you blind yourself to users. To arbitrarily throw away contrast based on a fashion that “looks good on my perfect screen in my perfectly lit office” is abdicating designers’ responsibilities to the very people for whom they are designing. Hat tip to Robert J. Sawyer. It’s great when you have a lab to go to a conference with. But not everyone has a lab. Here are tips for how to rock a conference solo . An occasional reminder that if your poster hangs for several days, create opportunities for people to give feedback when you are not there: Hat tip to Ciera Martinez . Stephen Heard is unimpressed with most conference badges . This led me to another discussion o...

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