Lessons from political parties: More points means less clarity

One of the major American political parties shared this on their social media accounts this weekend.

I saw this post not in its original form, but from critiques of it. And it deserves those critiques.

The design emphasizes (the appearance of) quantity over quality. This is not for reading. It is meant to look busy.

I was struck by how much this reminded me of many conference posters: no overarching narrative or message and dense to the point of being unreadable.

The one good thing that this does is that the headline is big and readable. But the headline conveys no key point. It announces that it is a list and nothing else. I cannot stress enough the importance of having a singular narrative.

What might that singular narrative be? The first three points on the list suggest a better headline:

• Every House Democrat voted against Trump’s budget that slashes Medicaid.
• House Democrats introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act to permanently protect the American people’s data from Elon Musk and Trump.
• Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit to stop Elon Musk from accessing Americans’ data.

All of them concern the federal government. Two individuals are mentioned twice. A more powerful headline might be, “How Democrats fought to protect Americans from Trump and Musk last month.” That’s a headline I wouldn’t even rate as good. I would rate it as barely adequate. But it’s better than, “Here’s a list.”

Likewise, there are 32 bullet points. Pick just the ones that reinforce the headline. The three above are probably enough. There are more points that begin, “Every Democrat voted against...”. Those could be combined into “Every Democrat voted against Trump’s [adjective] cabinet choices.”

Yes, focusing on the federal government in this graphic means ignoring the state governors here, but so what? Make more graphics. One for each state if you must.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in our own research and the academic way of doing things that we are maybe too forgiving of these problems. I am hoping that when you see someone else making these decisions, it’ll be easier to recognize how ineffective the result is.

Your conference poster should have less than one thousand words

One of the biggest realizations I have had in the time I have been writing this blog was that on average, people want to spend about five minutes at a poster.

If you are at the poster, you can develop and give some kind of summary of the poster that comes in under five minutes. 

But what if you are not there? How much text can you have on the poster that someone will look at it and think, “I can read that in about five minutes?”

I think the upper limit – a hard, difficult high end – is one thousand words.

A quick search suggests that people read at rates of a little over 200 words a minute. An overall average for all kinds of adults is estimated at 238 words a minute. 

Now, it gets more complicated. On the one hand, most people at an academic conference are skilled readers. You might expect them to read a little faster. University students are estimated to read at 250 words a minute. 

On the other hand, text text on conference posters is usually technical academic writing. You might expect that would slow the reading rater down. One estimate (no citation) is that people read technical works at 75 words a minute. You would only get through 375 words in five minutes at that rate.

If your poster is clearly written without any technical jargon, you might push the number of words into the high hundred.

If your poster is written more like a journal article, with jargon and acronyms, and all the typical style of academic prose, any word count above the mid-hundreds will probably frustrate readers.

If you can pull your word count down to maybe 300 or 350, you have the chance to pull in far more browsers who will think that they can get something out of your poster in five minutes.

The “No words” test: What does your poster say after you take away the words?

Posters are a visual medium.

You check if you’re using the visual aspect of the poster format effectively by taking away all the words.

Without text, this poster by Recovery Health has nothing on it that tells you it has anything to do with health. It could be a biology poster, a political science poster, an archaeology poster, maybe even a chemistry or humanities poster.

Here are a few more examples of posters that I spotted on Twitter that, if you removed the words, could be about anything.

Poster tweeted by University of North Carolina Medicine.

Poster tweeted by Rachel Cooper.

Once I started getting sensitized to this, it was surprising to me how many posters had no visual indications of what their topic was about. 

Look for a photograph. Look for an icon. Look for an illustration. Look for something that doesn't have to be read that cues in a viewer what the broad topic of your poster is.

“But my work is abstract and conceptual!” Look, Andy Pizza just published a book of illustrations of things that are literally invisible. 

And David McCandless created an illustration of philosophical theories of mind. (Hat tip to Steve Stewart-Williams.)

There are more ways to give visual indications of the topic of your work than you might think at first.

Hung punctuation

Below is a recent cover of The Lancet.

The Lancet does a pull quote (an excerpt from an article inside) on every cover. I just wanted to draw your attention to a little detail that shows this is done by pros.

The opening quotation mark. Look at how it’s placed compared to the text below it. It pokes out a bit compared to the lines below.

This is “hung punctuation.” The idea is that is enhances the sense of alignment and prevents unwanted spacing at the start of a line. This is one of those little details that professionals do, but that isn’t built into apps like Microsoft Office.

Here’s part of the quote done in PowerPoint so you can see where the opening quotation mark sits.

While it’s probably not all that critical for body text, it is a nice little thing to keep in mind if you are ever using a pull quote.

External links

Type talk: To hang or not to hang...

Other easy reads don’t use bullet points. Maybe your poster shouldn’t, either.

Bullet points are overused on conference posters. But many people recommend them, often claiming that bulleted lists are “easier to read.”

If bullet points were truly easier to read, you should see them in publications aimed at wide readership.

Like People magazine.

Here’s the first few paragraphs of an article on the People website about Selena Gomez.

Here’s the start of an article quoting Laila Ali.

But maybe you think People is still too high brow? How about the infamously goofy tabloid, The Weekly World News?  

Here’s a recent article about bird attacks:

Huh. No bullet points there, either.

How about a magazine specifically aimed at novice readers? You know, for kids? Like Sports Illustrated Kids? If bullet points are easier, surely they would want to make their magazine accessible to kids?

From an article about their “Sportskid” of the year:

Again, you don’t really see bullet points. 

Kids magazines are kind of holdouts in mainly being in print and not online, I can’t find a current issue of Ranger Rick online, but here’s a sample of a 2016 article (the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary).

You should be expecting it by now. No bullet points to be seen.

So professionals who are genuinely trying to make things easy to read because that is their specific target audience do not use bullet points. I think we are reaching the point where we can say that “bullet points are easy to read” is a myth. Or if not a myth, not standard practice. It seems to be academics in particular who have a bullet list fixation.

I think the only reason this advice comes up so often for posters is because PowerPoint is so often used to make posters.

Related posts

Bullets versus sentences

Link roundup for February 2022 

Ten simple rules for conference posters

I am being a lazy blogger and turning a Twitter thread into a blog post. John Butler asked for, “Something like 10 steps for a good conference poster.”

So I made something up off the top of my head.

1. Read the instructions. Sounds easy, but printers say “wrong size” is the #1 problem they see.
2. Your title is most of your communication effort. It’s all most people will ever read. Spend a lot of time on your title! Don’t just use the first one that comes to mind. Simple declarative statements of the main finding work well.
3. You should be able say what your poster is about in one sentence. Too many people want to show everything they have done. Focus.
4. Make you one sentence in an ABT (and, but, therefore) format. What are a couple of facts? (“We know X and Y...”) What is the problem? (“But X doesn't hold in this case...”) What is the consequence of that? (“Therefore...”)
5. Make a grid. A three column grid is really hard to screw up. It’s not the only way. More or fewer columns can work. Rows can work. But three columns is a robust layout.
6. Leave space. Lots of people, because they did not focus enough (#3), make skinny little margins to try to fit more stuff on. It’s hard to read. Be generous with margins between columns, and with white space between text and graphics.
7. Be consistent. Consistent fonts. Consistent colours. Consistent column width. A common is that people make graphs before the poster, and don’t go back to make the graph fit with the rest of the poster.
8. Bigger is better. A common question is, “What’s the minimum font size for a poster?” (This is often coming from people trying to shove too much stuff on the page.) Accessibility guidelines usually recommend type be several times bigger than what many people use.
9. Practice what you are going to say. Do this before you print your poster. Sometimes you’ll find the order you laid stuff out in (because “It just fit there”) is not the natural order when you talk it through. The visuals and your explanation should follow the same order.
10. Do the “arm’s length” test. When you’re done layout, print your poster scaled down to a single letter sized piece of paper. Hold it at arm’s length. If your vision is reasonable, you should be able to read your shrunk down poster at arm's length. If you can’t, it’s too small.

The Twitter thread has marginally related GIFs.

External links

Ten simple rules for a good poster presentation

(PLOS Computational Biology)

Your poster text is too damn small!

One of the most frequent questions I get when I talk about posters is, “What’s a minimum point size?” I got it a few weeks ago when I was speaking at the Plant Biology meeting. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might guess that it’s hard to answer this question. But in general:

Your poster text is too damn small.

One place we can look for guidance for text size is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the act, which was a big win for people with disabilities in the United States. The ADA has a lot of specifications intended to maximize accessibility for people, including people with visual limitations.

Not surprisingly, the ADA does not offer guidance for academic conference posters. But it does offer guidance for signs. Signs are probably a pretty good parallel for conference posters. Both need to be visible from a distance and easily read, even for someone with less than perfect vision.

Rather than using point size, the ADA makes recommendations based on the height of capital letters; the uppercase letter “I” if you want to be specific.

The ADA requires that the capital “I” on signs be 16 mm tall if you are viewing from six feet or less. That is the usual kind of range people are viewing conference posters. That’s usually in the ballpark of a 66 point font. Point size is not a precise thing in digital fonts, so you have to double check the exact point size.

If you are viewing from further away (as someone might be when reading your poster title, say), the required minimum size goes up. For ten feet, that recommend height of capital letters is 28.8 mm, which is around 120 points.

Those ADA requirements for signage asks for text that is much larger than I usually see when people talk about “minimum point sizes.” I usually see recommendations like, “No smaller than 24 points” (that was AGU’s recommendation last year for body text, for instance) – less than half the ADA standard.

Of course, the ADA is not the only guidelines out there for making visual material accessible to many people. I’m sure other nations have developed their own standard for accessibility.

Nor I am not saying your academic conference poster needs to be ADA compliant. But I think this is a good example of a mismatch between the concern of many academics, which is “Show as much stuff as I can” and the concerns of people thinking about accessibility, which is, “Make is visible to as many people as I can.”

When face-to-face poster sessions return, consider it a challenge to make your poster ADA compliant!

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!

Critique: RNA capping

Today’s contribution comes from Melvin Noé González. It was presented at an RNA meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Click to enlarge!

He writes:

Through the years I experimented with various templates for poster presentation, and I’m proud to say I’m really happy with how this one turned out. As you will find, I used a piece of advice you mentioned in one of your posts regarding a short summary section — and people loved it! I was approached by several people just because they thought the layout was cool, even though I wasn’t related to their research.

I’m always glad to have feedback that advice works!

The title bar works well, by presenting everything cleanly. The logo is sensibly over to one side, and blends into the background. The authors names are prominent, with institution and contact information legible, but low key.

This poster is well organized, which helps walk you though what is maybe a little too much material. The numbers by each heading ensure you don’t get lost.

Some of the layout would benefit from a little more tweaking. The spacing between the boxes is inconsistent. The margin above the “Graphical summary” are wider than the margins between the “Background” boxes and the data boxes on the right.

There’s one place where this poster goes off the rails. Fortunately, it’s down in the fine print section, in the acknowledgements and references. While I appreciate how beautiful that three-dimensional molecular structure is, and how much it adds visually to the poster, it does terrible things to the text around it.

It’s tearing that text apart.

When we read, we expect related text to be close together. When I look at the “Acknowledgements,” I see two blocks of text that I want to read separately.

But how you are supposed to read the acknowledgements is far more complicated. What I thought was the first sentence of the first text block is the third fragment of the entire acknowledgements section.

Just when I think I have gotten used to the lines broken into two pieces, the second to last line gets split into three pieces.

The same thing happens in the references, with a DOI number danging far from the “doi:” text identifying it.

Wrapping text around an object can look graceful and elegant. But you cannot just “set and forget” a setting in your layout software. You have to be willing to go in and adjust things by hand to avoid these kinds of problems.

Link round-up for December 2017

One of the problems with free fonts is that they often don’t have special characters that are necessary for proper display of characters from other languages, or symbols.

Google Noto is a series of fonts meant to have almost every character (and emoji!) in as many languages as possible. When I scrolled down the list and saw, “Canadian aboriginal,” I knew they were serious.

I downloaded Noto Sans, and was impressed.

Not only are there over 30 variations of Noto Sans, including thin, bold, condensed, extended, and combinations thereof, going into “Insert symbol” to see the individual characters is eye-opening. You think you’re a typographic sophisticate for recognizing and using an interrobang? Noto has that, and an inverted interrobang. There are combinations of letters and accents and umlauts and currency symbols I have never seen before.

The range of options is, frankly, staggering. There is no font package that comes Windows standard with this many options. Buying a font package with this many options would usually cost you many hundreds of dollars.

And Noto fonts are all free.

You have no excuse to use a lower case letter x in place of a multiplication sign, or not put an accent in a co-author's name, ever again.

Hat tip to Robert J. Sawyer.

• • • • •

Asada and colleagues have a new paper reviewing effective graphs, particularly in the are of public health. They’re very big into dot charts. I’m not convinced by their representation of variation in dot charts, though.

Hat tip to Hilda Bastian.

• • • • •

Another hat tip to Hilda for spotting a timeline of data visualizations and graphs.

• • • • •

Tony Roepke has good advice:

Note to poster presenters...don’t go out for a cigarette break right before your poster session.

Lessons from “Stone Cold” Steve Austin: There’s just one bottom line – and it should be your title

Margaret Moerchen wrote:

Every poster needs an executive summary like this!

I appreciate the sentiment here. Summaries are good. Highlighting those summaries is also good. But this doesn’t go far enough.

Four bullet points is too much.

Let’s turn the mic over to “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who famously pronounced:

Would Austin get the same reaction from the crowd if he said, “And those are the bottom four lines”?

Do we say, “Get to the points?” “Cut to the chases”? No. It’s singular in every case.

Here’s what I would suggest. Drill down those four points to one. Looking at the points above, I might suggest: “New techniques to measure carbon contents in vapor bubble,” or “Carbon content in the Hawaiian plume may be higher than in the MORB mantle.” Which I’d use would depend on whether I wanted to emphasize the techniques or the preliminary results.

Then, instead of sticking that one point away as a bottom line, make that one point the title of your poster. Don’t make people with 30 seconds hunt for your most important thing. Make it literally the first thing they read.

Showing authorship on posters

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 punctuation.

But if the team is that big, it is unlikely that they are all going to be at the conference. If we step into the needs of the reader for a second, what is the thing a conference goer might want to know? They certainly want to know who they might be talking to, that is, the poster presenter. They might also want to know the person behind the project, who is usually the most senior professor or staffer, and often the most recognizable “name” the poster might have.

Putting the full author list on an external link or down in find print in the corner might is harsh for the contributors. I know that. But in design, you have to grit your teeth and remember that it is not about you, or your friends. It’s about what the audience needs.

External links

When does authorship stop meaning anything useful?

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 worth thinking about as you lay out your poster. Is the most important stuff in the most important places? Too often I see critical material in the bottom, or the terminal area crowded up with references and acknowledgements. I’ve done the latter myself, but this diagram points out that the lower right corner is more important that I have sometimes given it credit for.

Hat tip to Heather Sears.

External links

The Gutenberg Diagram in Web Design
Understand how you can double the effectiveness of your publications in one simple move!
Reading gravity goes out the window
Getting back to basics with Ed Arnold

Picture from here. 

Four simple tips for shortening your poster

Few things will turn away a potential poster viewer like long paragraphs of text. So one of the recommendations I (and many others) make for posters is to write less stuff. But it is not easy.

There’s a saying (wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln), that if you have a short time to cut down a tree, spend most of it sharpening the axe. Here are some ways to sharpen your editorial axe.

1. Walk away.

When you’re in the middle of a project that you designed and carried out, everything seems important. But time away from something helps bring clarity. Think about a favourite album or TV series that you haven’t watched in years. You won’t remember all of it; you will remember the highlights.

You can get clarity by not working on a poster for a few days, then coming back at it with fresh eyes.

I think this is be the surest and best approach, the problem is that it takes time. You have to start early, and allot “cool down time” of a few days where you do not look at the poster. Given how many academics don’t want to give posters because they want to slap together a PowerPoint talk on the plane on their way to a conference, getting them to work on posters well in advance is a tall order.

2. Show it to someone else.

An outside viewer doesn’t have that emotional or intellectual investment in a project that you have. The further away you can get, the better. Show your poster to someone who isn’t in your lab. Show it to a non-expert. Show it to someone with a different skillset.

Just remember that an outside observer is not necessarily an unbiased one. Everyone has their own tastes and preferences and styles. An outside observer may not be objective, but they will at least have different biases than you.

3. ABT.

“ABT” is short for “And... But... Therefore.” You take two facts (joined by “and”), followed by the complication (“but”), and a resolution (“therefore”).
 
It is one of the single most effective tools I have found for drilling down to a key point. And it has the advantage of being quick (unlike #1) and not needing others (unlike #2).

I’ve done this with many poster presenters. When I ask them to talk about what their poster is about, it often takes a few minutes. I don’t think many of them believe me when I say they should be able to summarize their poster in a sentence. Then I do it using the ABT format. And I can usually see the expression on their faces indicating I’ve hit very close to the mark.

I wouldn’t recommend condensing the entire poster to one sentence, but it’s great at chopping a couple of lengthy introductory paragraphs into one crisp sentence.

Randy Olson first introduced this sentence structure in Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking (which I reviewed here), and has continued working with this tool in Houston, We Have a Narrative.

Additional: Randy notes that you can learn more about ABT in Story Circle Training here. He also advises for the verbal presentation that goes along with the poster:

1) Say your ABT, 2) Ask what person studies, 3) Find bridge between the two (from Samantha Roy)

4. Practice ruthlessness in all your writing. 

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White is not a perfect book on writing. Likewise, the fretting about Marxism in George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is very out-of-date. But both remain worth reading because of their emphasis on being concise.

There are many lists that alert you to lengthy stock phrases that can be replaced with shorter words. Once you attune yourself to stock phrases (“At this point in time,” “The fact that”), it becomes easier to recognize them, cut them out, and replace them without losing any meaning (“Now,” “That”).

External links

To Cut Down a Tree in Five Minutes Spend Three Minutes Sharpening Your Axe
Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking review

Lessons from the Miss Universe 2015 pageant: behind many fails lurk bad design choices

Anyone performing live dreads screwing up. At least in theatre, it’s unlikely to be recorded. But on television, those epic fails will live on for a long time.

This weekend, everyone was talking about this year’s Miss Universe pageant. I am not particularly interested in these events, but host Steve Harvey made an astonishing mistake on live television. He named the wrong winner.


It was just terrible for everyone concerned.

But soon after the event, the card Harvey had to read was posted:

Although this article says, “it’s safe to say it wasn’t the cue card’s fault,” it’s not that cut and dry. When the card was posted on Facebook:

The post has received almost 5000 comments, many agreeing it was understandable he misconstrued the order.

Suddenly, the path to the screw-up seems much more clear. This card did not help Harvey. And the problems with this card are ones that I see on posters all the time.

First, the card doesn’t follow our expected pattern for reading. Instead of the list running from top to bottom, after two names, it suddenly veers right into unknown territory. As this article put it:

(W)hy would they put the winner all the way down at the bottom, underneath “2nd runner up” and “1st runner up?” Everyone knows what “1st” means, and that’s just confusing(.)

There’s actually a term for the phenomenon of tending to ignore things that are placed over to the right: banner blindness. In this time of high Internet use, we’ve gotten used to mostly irrelevant stuff being shoved over to the sides, so people don’t look there very much.

The positions of the three slots on the card becomes more critical when you consider the circumstances when the card is read.

Harvey first reads the card when three finalists are standing to announce the second runner up. Then, to announce the winner, Harvey reads the card when two finalists are standing. When you have two people standing, it’s easy to make the link from the two people to the two words on the left, USA and Colombia. And which one are you going to read? 

And there’s one more problem:

“Philippines”... is printed precisely where a user would likely place their thumb.

Second, the size of the text doesn’t signal importance consistently. The best design feature of this card is that “Miss Universe 2015” is set in a large point size. But the critical word, the winning contestant, is far too small. It just vanishes off the page.

If “Philippines” had been the same size as “Miss Universe 2015,” I think the chance of a mistake would have dropped way down.

One other possibility would have been to make one separate card that declared the winner, with nothing else on it, so you could not confuse the sequence. But it’s easy to say that in retrospect, knowing that Harvey made a mistake.

I like this redesign:

Another redesign is here.

This card may well become one of the most intensely scrutinized pieces of design since the “butterfly ballots” in the 2000 American presidential election.
Everyone would like to think that they could read a card like the one that was posted. It wasn’t as though the text was unclear or incorrect. All you had to do was read. But the reality is that people make mistakes, and the way you expect someone to read a card is not necessarily the way they will read it.

External links

Look at Steve Harvey’s Card – He Was Set up to Fail
Would you be confused by the Miss Universe winner’s card?
Here’s A Look At The ‘Miss Universe’ Ballot Card That Caused Steve Harvey To Malfunction 
Steve Harvey Didn’t Ruin Miss Universe, Bad Design Did
We asked design experts if Steve Harvey's Miss Universe flub can be blamed on the ballot card
Don’t Blame Steve Harvey: Bad Design Caused the Miss Universe Fiasco
Last night’s Miss Universe screw-up could have been prevented with good UX

Hat tip to Sakshi Puri.

Critique: Rein it in

Opening up reader submissions for this blog is interesting. Sometimes, I make an audible sound when I first see the poster. Sort of a sharp intake of breath. Not quite a gasp. The sot of noise you make in the passenger seat and you see a car coming towards you and you’re not sure if the driver has seen it and you can’t hit the brakes or steer?

Maybe not quite that bad, but... it’s not a good sound.

Then there are times when you open up the file, and think, “Well, dang, am I going to have anything to write about that?”

Today’s contribution is more in the latter category than the first. It comes from Sourav Chakraborty, who gave me the okay to show this to you. Click to enlarge!

Sourav was inspired by a poster by Josefine Kühberger on this very blog, in fact. The result is a nice, clean, attractive poster. There is not a huge amount of text. The layout is clear. The base colours are subdued neutral shades (which I think is one of the main influences from Josefine’s poster), with brighter colours used to good effect for emphasis and highlighting, particularly in the code.

This poster uses bulleted lists, which I generally don’t like. Let’s have a closer look:

This list might be improved by creating a stronger and more distinct hierarchy between the different levels. The main bullets are black squares, and the secondary bullets are black circles.

It’s good that the two levels have different shapes and sizes, but the differences are not that big. I might try reducing the point size Particularly from a distance (or when reduced in size on the screen), the squares and circles look pretty similar. If you’re going to use different levels of lists, you want to make it clear that they are different.

Here’s a quick change to make them more distinct: a hollow circle instead of a filled one.

The difference alone is not enough: you also want to make sure that the differences work in the right direction following expectations of hierarchy. Here’s an example, where I create the same difference (hollowing a symbol), but the other way around:

Lightening the squares works against viewer’s expectations. You’ve made something important lower contrast, making is less noticeable, signalling that it is less important, not more. But the position says it’s more important, not less.

Here’s one more revision where I shrunk the secondary bullets to about 80% of the original, again to create a bigger difference between the different levels of text hierarchy.

Now it’s clearer which are the main points, and which are the secondary points.

Egalitarianism is great socially, but it’s not so great in text design.

Related posts

Bullets versus sentences

Bullets versus sentences

Some other resources on poster design recommend that people use bullet lists extensively for their posters. I advise against it, most of the time.

The pros of bullet lists is that by their nature, people tend to write less text. That concision is very useful on a poster, I admit.

But I want to argue there are more negatives to using bullets that positives.

First, my experience with looking at PowerPoint slides is that people are inconsistent in how they type bullet lists. For example, people often punctuate some bullet points with a period, but leave others without a period. When people write sentences in paragraphs, they will put a period at the end of every sentence.

Second, the size and spacing of bullet points is often badly done in software. Even PowerPoint, the culprit that made bullets ubiquitous, doesn’t scale well when you move outside of the standard slide sizes. Here’s a quick mock-up for a four foot wide poster with a bulleted list (click to enlarge):

Under this default scheme, the bullets are too far from the text. The spacing between lines and points is also a little dodgy. Microsoft Publisher, which I use a lot for posters, handles bullets even more poorly.

Third, bullets destroy narrative. Edward Tufte has made a thorough analysis (from The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, excerpt quoted here):

Lists can communicate three logical relationships: sequence (first to last in time); priority (least to most important or vice versa); or simple membership in a set (these items relate to one another in some way, but the nature of that relationship remains unstated). And a list can show only one of those relationships at a time.

Bullet lists may be more concise, but they are impoverished compared to sentences in paragraphs. Sentences can express many more relationships.

Fourth, readers are trained to read sentences in paragraphs. It is the most common thing we read, and is how we expect to absorb complicated ideas.

This is not to say that bulleted lists are useless. They are completely appropriate for short lists. A poster, though, should be more than just short lists. For example, I feel okay about using a bulleted list for a quick summary of my case again bullet points:

• Bullets are used inconsistently
• Bullets are poorly typeset
• Bullets show relationships poorly
• Readers are used to sentences

I don’t think I would convince anyone of my argument if that list were all I posted.

External links

The Zen of Presentations, Part 41: Consistency

Photo by David Stillman on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Stretching out your title

People are used to tinkering with the vertical spacing of text; having to make a manuscript double spaced, for instance. But they are not as familiar with how to make text look good by adjusting the horizontal spacing.

John McWade reminds us of a useful tip about the spacing of type:

Text meant to be read at a distance – like the title of your poster – should be expanded a little!

Since most people are making posters in PowerPoint (despite my constant pestering for you to stop doing that), Let me tell you a couple of ways to do this in PowerPoint.

Select your text, right click it, select “Font,” and pick the “Character spacing” tab. That allows you quite precise control over the spacing:

There is also a “horizontal spacing” button in the “Font” ribbon. The drop down options for that one, however, are more general: “Loose” and “Very loose.”

Here’s a sample of how text looks expanded. “Loose” is a little more than 2 point spacing.

“Loose” might not be a bad setting to try for titles, and maybe headings, on posters.

After you’re done here, practice your horizontal letter placement skills by playing this kerning game.

External links

The unexpected typestyle of Ikea