Skip to main content

Critique: Feather sections

The poster contributors from the last Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting have continued to be generous with sharing their work. I’m pleased to show off another beauty from that meeting. This one was designed by Christian Laurent, and printed by VividInk printing in New Orleans. Click to enlarge!


Christian wrote:

This poster took a long long time to become what you see now. The cross sections on the left are actually tiled synchrotron radiation computerized tomography (CT) scans, with 325 nm per pixel! That means this whole poster was ~34 GB! (RAM = Rarely Adequate Memory 😛)

We wanted to show them in this much detail is because this work is showcasing a new method to identify fibre orientation by imaging proxy voids. These are much more visible in the grey portion of the text, which is an enlarged one of said cross sections. Have a look for the small white feather scale car next to the middle cross section and it should be evident why this poster is 34 GB, and how much data you can see if you look hard enough.

The CT scans were stitched together in Fiji. The poster was mostly composed in the GIMP, but the vector curved text was made in Inkscape. We’re very happy with the overall look of the poster now!

Christian’s poster succeeds because it understands that a poster is a visual medium. I can’t say this enough. Everything here starts with the graphics, and text is clearly secondary. This is clearest on the right, as the text wraps and conforms to the images it sits on, respecting that beautiful arc of the feather scan on the one side, and the curve of the wing on the other, rather than taking the more typical right angles. To make that work, Christian was obviously more proficient in Inkscape than I became. (I also tried GIMP for a while, but got too frustrated with it.)

One downside of this poster is that it is mostly monochrome. This makes it a little drab, but with only three levels of grayscale – black, mid-level gray, and white – everything is distinct from each other, and thus visible. However, the lack of colour in the main poster body does mean that the small patches of colour in the small logos in the bottom end up drawing your eye more than they should.

Speaking of logos, the “University of Southampton” logo at the top has about the same visual weight as the title. The logo is placed above the title, signalling greater importance. I might have increase the title by abour 10-20% and reduced the logo by 20-30%. Remember, the title of your poster should be the undisputed king of the poster. Nothing should compete with the title.

In addition to the poster shown here, Christian also some cut outs on his poster board. They were the same cross sections in the poster, printed larger on foam board, laid on top of one another. These again helped to make the board more interesting, and set it apart from the others plain old pieces of paper on most boards.

Related posts

The eye loves the circle
No more slidesters, part 7: Inkscape
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Critique and makeover: Landfill bacteria

Today’s contribution comes from Patric Chua, who gave me permission to post this. Click to enlarge! Patric had this to say: Better Posters has been my guide for poster designs ( Aw, thanks! - ZF ), and I've followed the many ideas for this poster. I understand that PowerPoint is not the best tool, but I hope it will suffice. The design of the poster is inspired by infographics - I did not want it to conform to the IMRAD template. Each section can be read independently and has its own method and results. However, I’m afraid that I’ve falling into the trap where I’ve placed too many information in. I also think that the poster lacks a strong entry point. The piece de resistance is probably the bottom right corner where I followed the advice on Inviting interactions post. I plan to attach cardboard boxes and place comment cards in the first box to make it easier for the audience. The amount of work that went into this is impressive. I’ve opened the file and seen just how many indiv...
Post a Comment
Read more