Critique: Dinosaur necks

Today’s poster comes from Mike Taylor, who blogs at SV-POW!, along with co-authors Matt Wedell and Darren Naish (though Darren mostly blogs at Tetrapod Zoology these days).

This is a poster trying to be a short paper. The text is foremost. The good news is that it is entirely self-sufficient. I can read this and understand the entire thing without anyone there to explain it to me.The headings are choice. Rather than using the standard IMRAD headings, each one makes a key statement that is unpacked in the following paragraphs.But those paragraphs are the poster’s main weakness. This is so text heavy, I might not be inclined to stop and read it if there wasn’t someone there to talk to. I would have tried to cut as much of the main text out as possible, and make the headings bigger.

I’m not crazy about using pictures for backgrounds. This one has the disadvantage of only covering ¾ of the poster! I will give credit, however, for not doing what many would have done: stretching the picture wider until it fit. The background picture is undistorted. But the white left hand column feels tacked on, disconnected from the rest of the poster. This could be addressed in a few ways.In my graphics editor, I used the eyedropper tool to find the most prominent colour on the left side, along the boundary with the white right hand column. Then, I used the fill tool to drop that colour in, replacing the white on the right side:

This “quick and dirty” fix makes the poster fell a little more like a unified whole. Perhaps even better would have been to center the background image, and do the same match for the “tan” on the left hand side. Or, use one of these tricks from John McWade.

There are also a few other layout tweaks that could be made. Aligning the tops of the columns and evening up the column widths would help tidy things up.While this poster could be better (as any poster can be), I give it complete credit for passing one important test: I was never confused while looking at it.