The Grey Lit Café
The Grey Lit Café
Effective design features on posters (GM1 comms)
If you're studying on the University of Cambridge's Multidisciplinary Design course, this episode is for you.
The episode focuses on the visual aspects of advice.
It seeks to provide pragmatic recommendations that will make a marked difference to the communicative effectiveness of your poster presentation.
Contents
- 00:00 Navigation
- 01:56 Visual aspects of text
- 04:25 Contrast
- 07:21 Alignment
- 09:13 Naming
- 10:29 Further resource
Further Resources
Robin Williams, The non-designer’s design book, 4th edn (Peachpit
Press, 2014).
Writing, designing, and presenting a poster (a writing protocol): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bW8sj5j1W70PjYLUuLgPLPADyOvUOXVV/view/.
Credit: The music, from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, is courtesy of the US Marine Band.
About the publisher
This episode is published by Frontinus Ltd. We're a communications consultancy that helps organisations and individuals to communicate scientific, professional, and technical content to non-specialist audiences.
We provide
- consultancy
- mentoring
- editing and writing
- training
and work on presentations, bids and proposals, and publications (for example, reports and papers).
To learn more about services or explore ways of working together, please contact us via our website, http://frontinus.org.uk/.
Hello and welcome to this, the third episode on poster presentations. My name's Bart and I'm going to be your host today. And with me, I'm delighted to have Anthony Haynes, who is the creative director of Frontines Limited. So welcome, Anthony.
SPEAKER_01:Greetings, Bart.
SPEAKER_02:So you've decided this episode to discuss aspects of visual design on posters. Now, this is something I find really very interesting. So where are you going to lead us today, Anthony?
SPEAKER_01:Well, as it happens, that phrase lead us is rather appetite because I thought the first thing we should discuss is the business of navigation. I think it should be instantly. clear to someone when they look at your poster in what order, what sequence they should read the various components on the poster. So there's no guesswork involved at all. And this isn't always the case. So I'm going to give you an example of a very common example of ambiguity here. Sometimes people divide a poster into quadrants, you know, four panels, two rows, two columns. And in English, everyone automatically reads the top left. Where do you go next? And some people will go into the top right and some people will go to the bottom left so you don't want that ambiguity and of course the solution is very simple it's just annotate the poster i mean you use arrows to move people from one bit to another or use numbers to indicate the secrets or do both i mean people won't feel patronized they just want you to make it clear so you don't have to put any effort into it
SPEAKER_02:no that's fair and i guess also they might not even consciously notice the presence of the numbers and the arrows but the job will be done
SPEAKER_01:That's right. Yeah, they notice the absence of such things, yes.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, that's very true. Okay, so that's a great first point. What other design aspects would you say are crucial?
SPEAKER_01:I think it's important to think about the spacing of text and the placement of text. I think there are two key things to get right that often go wrong. One is keep the lines of text short. So we tend to naturally assume that when people are reading, their eyes are moving regularly across the page. a continuous movement. And actually, that's not the case. I mean, we know an awful lot about eye movements of reading. And what people do is move their eyes, make discrete leaps across the page. And if your lines are too long, they're going to make an extra one or more leaps. And that's not great. So there is a reason why newspapers and magazines prefer narrow columns. So keep the columns narrow. And the difficulty here is if you're designing on a desktop or a laptop, you can write a column of text And you think, well, that's not very long. But of course, once it's blown up because it's printed on a poster, well, it is very long. So you need to think about how this translates from computer screen into poster. And then the second thing to think about is keeping paragraphs short. I'm going to suggest that for most paragraphs on posters, they should be one sentence long. I mean, possibly two. So this is very different from the way that you would write an essay, say, or a dissertation or whatever, where you will typically have more evolved paragraphs. And the problem here is that when you're reading a poster from a distance, we don't really read it the same way that we would read, say, a journal paper in our lap. And what we tend to do is look at the openings of paragraphs and then we skip middle of the paragraph it's too much effort to kind of decode what's there in the middle so it gets it gets buried so putting this right people find it a bit disconcerting because when you talk to people you often find they had you know a teacher called mrs brown or whoever in year 10 of their schooling who um who told you you mustn't write in single sentence paragraphs which was no doubt great advice when they were doing o-level english or whatever subject but it's not good advice for posters so you actually have to put your high school teacher back in their box and go for single sentence paragraphs, however awkward that feels to you.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, and I think it definitely would feel awkward because some things are so innate that those are hard habits to break, right? All right, so what other design features would you recommend, Anthony?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think we should think about contrast. And I'm drawing here on some advice from a book by Robin Williams. The book is called The Non-Designer's Design Book. And I'll obviously put the reference into the show notes. It's one of the best how-to books I've read on anything. It's really brilliant in terms of teaching you to think about design. And one of the things she said is use contrast because contrast creates interest. And she illustrates this point with a number of documents, some with contrast, some without. And I think her case is very Very persuasive. So you have a number of different kinds of contrast available to you for a poster. I mentioned the three obvious ones, which is size of things, the color and the type of the typeface, the selection of typeface. And by using contrast in these areas, you can attract people's interest. And the big piece of advice that Robin Williams gives is don't be a wimp. don't be a wimp go for it big time so to leave the example posters for a moment i mean when people are writing something like an essay they will typically write in 12 point font and then they think oh i'll put the i'll put the title in 14 point and then in a daring moment they think oh i might push it up to 16 you know and robin williams would say something like well how about 36 so you know see what that looks like wow i think particularly with color you don't want to be too tasteful so I remember on the course that we're working towards here I remember a group producing you know quite a good poster but it was all in shades of blue and it all looked very tasteful but it wasn't interesting it didn't grab your interest so I said to them no you've just got to be brash you've got to just be garish and create interest so I don't know if you can think of a better example I was going to use a slightly controversial example
SPEAKER_02:well it's interesting you should say that because the thing that pops into my mind immediately when you say that are record sleeves from the late 1970s and early 80s when the punk movement was well alive and it was all about being out there and brash and challenging assumptions and making something as visually grabbing if obnoxious at times but it was very very successful and it worked in that way
SPEAKER_01:yes that's right well that's better than my example i was going to use the example of donald trump who has this sort of you know bright sort of white yellow hair and a orange face and a red tie and a blue suit but i think your example will be much better received than mine i think the key thing to remember is the the poster is not an index of your own aesthetic sensibility
SPEAKER_02:That is very interesting. Very good advice. So if we're talking graphical design, because we've talked all sorts of different elements, we've talked about navigation elements, we've talked about textile elements, we've talked about contrasting elements. I can remember when I used to do poster design work, I used to be an absolute pedant for making sure there was a sense of arrangement and alignment on it. Have you got any advice on that front at all?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, so I want to draw again on the non-designers design book, Robin Williams, because alignment is one of, she has four design principles and that's one of them. And this had never occurred to me before. And I think it's great advice and it's extremely easy to implement. What she says is, when you're placing a new component on the page so let's say with a poster you've got one of the components is a graph you're going to put a graph on the page what she says is always make it align in some way with components that are already on the page so this might be one of the vertical edges the left or the right or both line them up it might be one of the horizontal edges the top or the bottom or both line them up might even be diagonal alignment but always make it align make things align. And if you don't do that, if they're slightly out of alignment, straight away the poster starts to look unprofessional and it starts to look scrappy. So I noticed this when I worked in book publishing. I worked with a number of very good book designers who designed covers, including back covers. And they would produce nice designs. And then when they finish, they think, oh, I've got to put a barcode on. So they kind of slap a barcode on. And they don't really think the barcode's part of the design because it's not theirs. It wasn't invented you know and often it kind of just ruins our the whole look of the back cover so i think her advice about aligning components is very good
SPEAKER_02:all right so i've got a lot of things to think about then what sort of closing gambits would you suggest are there essential components that really mustn't be
SPEAKER_01:forgotten well i think the most obvious one is make your name prominent so everyone puts their name on the poster but you know quite often i've looked at posters and and thought, that's interesting. And then I thought, who did that poster? You know, the name's on there, but I haven't really noticed it. So I was like, don't be shy about this. Because incidentally, good things come from posters. They're a form of networking and people sometimes contact you about them afterwards. Or even it can be as basic as they then meet you in a coffee break and they say, oh, you're the person who did that poster. So make it stand out, make it prominent, put it in bright red or something like that. So make it unmissable.
SPEAKER_02:Interesting. I have a man myself included there's going to be a number of people there cringing somewhat as to speaking very uncomfortable about that but that's absolutely true isn't it you've got to not be afraid about being forward about who you are and what your contribution is
SPEAKER_01:yes so your lecturer or supervisor or whatever you can put their name down the bottom in small writing no one's bothered but put your name very prominently
SPEAKER_02:I'm getting the impression Anthony that this is just the tip of the iceberg and there's a lot of other different desires concepts that one can apply to a poster. Have you got any other resources or any other information that interested parties could go to?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I've produced a protocol called Writing, Designing and Presenting a Poster, which basically gives you a series of actions that you can perform when you're creating your poster. So I will give you the URL. I will spell it out, but I will also put it in the show notes with a link. So that's probably easier for people. But the URL is www.frontinus.org.uk. Frontinus, all one word. imagine the word front f-r-o-n-t and the word in i-n and the word us u-s www.frontinus.org.uk as well as giving my own recommendations it also gives you references to third party resources so that sort of opens up the discussion and brings in far more considerations
SPEAKER_02:well Anthony thank you very much for an enlightening conversation today I've really enjoyed that and it's also given me a lot of food for thought as I'm sure Thank you Bart,
SPEAKER_01:I've enjoyed discussing it.
SPEAKER_02:And thank you for listening.
