Skip to main content

Critique: Peak fusion protein

Today’s poster comes from contributor Braeden Schaefer, and is shared with his permission. Click to enlarge!


Braeden notes:

The poster theme colors had to fall within ASU’s maroon, gold, black and white color palette. The western blot in the results section is only a placeholder that I found online. I’m still waiting on my western blotting results but wanted to see how it would look now.

There is a lot to like about this poster. The two column layout is crisp from a distance. Up close, though, you notice that the left hand labels for the figure break through into the left column, rather than staying contained where they ought to be.

The left hand side is nothing but text, but it is typeset well enough. The text is big enough to be readable, has wide margins, and clear subheading that remove some of the intimidation factor.

This poster is a nice follow-up from the last entry about the design problem inherent in collaborative posters. In this case, it’s not the authors so much that are the problem as the institutional affiliations. The affiliations are chewing up for more space than I would like in the title bar.



There are five affiliations given. But four of them are different schools within the same institution, Arizona State University. I would cut the author affiliations down to lines: the university and the institute. Yes, you lose information about the schools, but I’m not sure anyone in the audience cares. You could then put the institutions on one line, freeing up more room for the title.

Speaking of the title bar, I have no love lost for logos bookending the title. The left institute logo looks like it has been distorted and squished horizontally. But I’m even more baffled here that the ASU logo is repeated at the bottom of the poster. And in an optically heavy black box, no less.

The use of the campus’s colours works well. Generally, campus colours have been picked by pros to go together. They are a good way to provide a subtle bit of branding that doesn’t chew up space. I have no clear idea if there is any reason why some of the bars are in gold and some are in maroon. It seems like the gold might be trying to highlight the main messages, but it’s a muddied signal (if that is the intention) at best.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

Showing authorship on posters

More and more academic projects are collaborative . This means more contributors, and more authors to list on posters. I’ve been thinking about how long author lists might be best displayed on posters, and have a few attempts here. You can click to enlarge any picture! This might be the simplest multi-author scenario, where there are many authors, all from one institution. Many big collaborative projects involve people from different institutions, however. How can you show the affiliations of those authors? Many people emulate journals and use superscripts. This gets very complicated to read and difficult to read very quickly, however. Another approach might be to group the contributors by their institution. Let “relative contribution” or “alphabetical order” or “whatever other reason you have for deciding the order of authors” be damned. Everyone from a particular university goes together. This chews up more space, so you might be forced to use initials for the authors and cut back on...

When posters fail

When a poster fails, it’s usually because it failed early in the design process. Years ago , I showed this poster: It does not matter whether this poster does a lot of the detail work right. It does not matter how good the layout is, or how good the typography is, or whether the colour scheme is consistent and pleasing to the eye, or whether there is enough white space. None of that matters. The authors of this poster doomed it at the very beginning, when they picked a page size... and got it wrong. In my experience, there are two places where posters fail early on. On the content side, people do not edit enough . They want to include everything, rather than focusing on one thing, and the poster suffers. On the design side, people do not make a grid . They start drawing boxes without any underlying thought to structure, and treat their data like some sort of jigsaw puzzle to fit together. I was reminded of the while I was making a poster for the Student and Post-Doctoral Affairs Com...