Skip to main content

At a distance

Here are two posters from the same conference, photographed at roughly the same distance. (Identifying information has been slightly pixelated.)


This poster is not using its available space well. The board is half empty. But although I cannot read virtually anything at this distance except maybe the headings and title, I can see that there are bar graphs on the poster. I can see blocks of colour.


This poster is about the same size the one above, and suffers from not using its available space well. But it’s suffering in so many more ways. The content of the poster has faded away in the distance like disappearing into a fog. There are no blocks of colour; everything has turned to gray. You can make out that there are columns of text, but you can’t make out anything about the figures.

I am not sure either of these posters would pass the “arm’s length” test. But while both posters are far from ideal, the top one succeeds in that at least at these long distances, you can make out something that is recognizable.

The smaller and further away you can get from your poster and recognize something on it, the more successful your poster is likely to be. Even if that is just blocks of colour.

Related posts


Is it big enough? The “arm’s length” test
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You have options for numbers (PowerPoint users need not apply)

If you must  have a table on your poster, look into what options you have for your numbers. Many fonts have number variants. Proportional numbers have skinny numbers (e.g., 1) and wide numbers (e.g., 0). Two numbers differ in width depending on what numbers they have. But tabular numbers are all the same width. So decimal places and dividers will line up if the numbers are lined up, as they are in a table. If you have a table, it only makes sense to use tabular numbers if you can. They are explicitly designed to make your tables more readable! But tabular numbers will only do so if you follow a couple of other good practices: Make your numbers right aligned. Use the same number of decimal places in each column. You may also find a couple of other options. numbers can be either lining numbers (all the same height) or oldstyle (with ascenders and descenders, like upper and lower-case letters). That means you have four options for many fonts. In Microsoft Office, these options are...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

Critique: Lending low tech tools

Today’s poster contributor is Scott Johnson. Click to enlarge! This is a great marriage of content and form. The content is about something that is unabashedly “low tech,” so the hand-written, slightly lo-fi (okay, low tech) look is completely right here. It adds character and interest. Regular readers know that I personally am anti-underlining, and try to remove it in almost every instance I see it. But here, because it’s hand written, I can see the case for it. When people write by hand, they do underline for emphasis. I would experiment a bit with removing the underline, but I don’t know if removing the the underlines for headings and making the headinga a bit bolder would lose the look. I appreciate the purity of the monochrome greyscale, but it does wash out from a distance. I would like to see a little colour – even if subdued, and not everywhere. To keep the “low tech” look, I would suggest referencing some old photos, like daguerreotypes. They often weren’t pure shades of gr...
Post a Comment
Read more