Coming round the corner

Regular readers will know of my distaste for boxes around things on posters. But that’s doubled for boxes with round corners.

There is a “square peg in a round hole” problem. Blocks of text typically “want” to be rectangular. The corners of the rectangle implied by the text fight with the round corners of the box.

Most graphs want to be rectangular, too. And most photographs.

PowerPoint has some sort of algorithm that rounds the corners more for bigger boxes. So if your boxes are different sizes – which they almost always are on posters – your corners are going to be rounded off by different amounts. Click to enlarge!

You can fix this tweaking the corners by hand. There’s a yellow dot near one corner of the box that you can drag to make the corner more or less rounded. The problem is that to do this, you have to recognize it as a problem!

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Link roundup for May, 2018

Poster season has started, so we have people tweeting the coolest ones. Here is one by Alison Wardlow: She starts with a blank page, then draws the poster while explaining her theory. Bold move. And people told me it couldn’t be done when I suggested this years ago ! Hat tip to Nancy Chen and Emily Austen . and B. Haas . • • • • • • The biggest debate in typography rears its ugly head again. One space or two after a period ? I’ll save you a click. The effects are small – at best. The study was done with a monospaced font, which you rarely see any more. It may not apply to most typefaces you will see. • • • • • • Confession: I’ve been interested in conference badges since I read this article about them in American Scientist . I keep scans of my badges from meetings I’ve been to. So I was interested in this website , which does for conference badges what this blog tries to do for posters (though it doesn’t seem to be updated). It sprung o...

Giving credit to designers

It’s nice when people spread the news of good work: Emily Jones, grad student at University of Dayton, presented a poster on her field work plan for exotic species interactions in a Texas coastal prairie. This got sent my way on the twittersphere (hat tip to Meghan Duffy ) because it is a very nice looking poster. Her stunning poster was co-designed with an undergrad graphic artist as part of a class. How cool! But several people (including Andrea Kirkwood and Hannah Brazeau ) mentioned that if the design is noteworthy enough to mention, maybe throw in the names of the students doing that design, too? The designers’ names are on the poster, up at the top under the title, which is great to see. I know from some people working with illustrators that the people making those graphics often significantly help bring clarity on the conceptual side, too. Good designers are often colleagues, and should be given that level of credit, not just down in the “Acknowledgements” fine print. Graphi...

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 ...

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