Link roundup for April, 2018

Charlotte Payne, I love you! Well, not in that way. I love you for tweeting about posters in haiku. I think my favourite is this one, on de-extinction:

resurrect the lost?
can we really right our wrongs
with a tweaked dodo?

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Here’s how Meredith Rawls made an award-winning poster. Here are a couple of points in her description that I like:

Re-read the abstract you submitted to the conference weeks ago. Is it overly ambitious? Totally off-base? No matter. Your poster is an opportunity to communicate what you’ve done as of TODAY.

Do you know what I did with all the words I wanted to put on my poster but didn’t? I used them in conversations, and they appear or will appear in papers.

And here’s said poster:

Very nice!

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A lot of people on Twitter were impressed by this poster:

This is a great example of how a poster can be, at one time, very simple and focused conceptually (there’s really only one figure, and no text elaborating introductions and methods and so on), and yet still show be very rich, showing a lot of data.

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Nominee for “Best title of a poster, ever”, from Bryan Ward:

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More unsolicited recommendations. Kirsty McLeod reckons Alecia Carter makes “the best posters I’ve ever seen!” Here’s one, and it would certainly stand out at a conference:

Check out more of Alecia’s work here.

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Interesting presentation (in blog post) on whether design is too insular. Hat tip to Melissa Vaught.

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Adam Calhoun lets us look into his creative process for designing a poster:

They all start like this.

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Dyslexie is a font intended to aid dyslexics. Their page shows lots of clever ideas to distinguish letters.

Hat tip to Margeaux and Asia Murphy.

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The May 2018 issue of American Scientist has a nice little feature on the design of business cards by Henry Petroski. Excerpt:

It was because of incorporation into mechanical filing systems such as the Rolodex that business cards became standardized in size. A square or outsize card might have stuck out from the bunch, but it also might have made the system jam and become useless. Being different for the sake of being different can defeat the object of any design.

It runs on pages 144-147.

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There is a font inspired by Charles Darwin’s handwriting.

Hat tip to Andy Farke.

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 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...

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