publisher tips

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...

No, I haven’t gone full Tolkien this week. Mediterranean means “Middle of the Earth,” right? This week’s poster about the Mediterranean Sea comes from kindly contributor Francisco Pastor. Click to enlarge! Francisco is a repeat customer of this blog. One of his earlier poster was reviewed here last year , but this iteration is in Spanish. One of the things I like about graphic design is that you don’t always need to be able to understand the exact language to be able to offer advice! (Though I’m not sure what I would make of a poster in Korean or Hindi.) Francisco’s aims were to “increase importance for graphical info and reduce text. I also tried to highlight conclusion sections and added a screenshot to publish our sea surface temperature website.” Compared to the previous poster, I think this version is more successful at meeting those goals. The images are bigger and the take home message is more obvious and cleaner. But some problems that were in the previous poster are still cree...

Posters are like muffins. The top is so much better than the bottom. In muffins, the top is better because of the wonders of caramelization , and because that’s where it’s the easiest to put on ingredients like chocolate chips, glaze, fruit peeling, cream cheese, or what have you. The bottom of muffins are just okay in comparison. It’s not surprising that there are many products that are designed to give people only the delicious muffin tops and not the less appetizing muffin stumps. In posters, the top half is better because it’s sitting at or above eye level. The title is above eye level, which is important because it moves the title above most people’s heads so it can be seen from a long way away. The space underneath the title sits right around typical eye levels, and that’s where people look the most. Put as much of the good stuff on your poster in that top half. Your big, important question, hypothesis, or prediction. Your sexist, biggest result. Your bold interpretation or co...

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...

There are two good choices for placing objects on a page. You can separate them. Or you can overlap them. But it’s a bad option is to have two objects almost touching... Or just barely touching. Of course, it can be worse. Having sharp edges and round edges almost touching creates a discomfort to your eyes that you can almost feel. You’re just waiting for the balloon to pop. You get the same effects with the rectangles you see more often on posters. Having objects very close, but with neither clear separation or overlap, feels much less comfortable Than clear overlap... Or distinct separation. Unless you are going for visual tension, make a choice. Split them apart or have one cover the other. Don’t have any tenuous touches. To sum up: