Melissa Delucchi's blog

It looks really good. Although most people dislike the "staggered" picture layout, you've laid it out nicely. The justification of the figure captions makes it very clear which captions go with which figures. The location of the Figure 5 caption (below Figure 6) is a bit awkward, but if you're going to include that info as a caption anywhere, that is the best place. I like how the References heading is smaller, black, and italicized. Definitely keep all three of those attributes. But I might get rid of the colon. The text below the Conclusions heading could be moved up slightly to match the spacing elsewhere. You might want to put a dot after your middle initial although that sort of messes up the spacing and tends to look funny. All of the columns look like they are the same width, so the title might be off-center. The Case logo and Constellation X logo are farther from the edges than from the top -- that's good. It looks better than having equal margins around the logos. Also, I like the choice of College of Arts and Sciences. I put the Case School of Engineering logo on mine. (Yes, I gave in and used the Case logo.) You increased separation between columns and it looks better. The text below Coded Aperture Imaging, One-Dimensional Reconstruction, and Acknowledgments is closer to those headings. I'm guessing that was on purpose? I like the red dividers. My poster is has a black/red, diagonal gradient background and red bars beneath each heading. I might put Department of Physics before Case Western Reserve University. Excellent poster. I would vote for it! By the way, I prefer "cataloguing" to "cataloging". The latter looks like cat-uh-loj-ing. :)

https://filer.case.edu/mmd11/SOURCE/4-14.pdf

I noticed that the title is off-center so that the white space between logos matches. I think it does look better the way that it is, and would look a lot more awkward if the spacing between title and logos was unbalanced.

I actually didn't notice that the title was off-center. I had a hell of a time making things centered with respect to the whole page in power point, but if you think it looks better the way it is, I'll keep it! The link in the main body text should be fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up.

The "Figure 5" caption is actually a typo - a result of not doing my entire poster in LaTeX. That would ROCK so incredibly hard, but... yeah... I have a life. That was a Singer-like catch, though.

Turns out, the first time around, I was being a bit of a moron, and I was trying to make my entire poster at 1/2 scale. This wouldn't be a problem if I also scaled my fonts down, but I forgot about my scale and tried to still make all my text readable. Once I just used 1:1, I could actually add a lot of text back in and include a fair amount of white-space.

You do know that even though you have decided to start censoring, those entries were already distributed by RSS feed. I like how you ask for criticism and than delete the criticism.

This is not a forum for criticism of my person, but for a poster. Your comments were inappropriate, and honestly, I think you're a wuss for always posting anonymously. Don't you have anything better to do with your time than pester other people on their blog? What kind of person does it take to do that?

Melissa,
I would not get too upset. There are always people out their with an opinion. I have blogged for a couple of years now and learned you always have to take the good with the bad.

When you ask for opinions or feedback, you will have no problem receiving it. The Case blog, wiki, and forums are well monitored by RSS feeds or other mechanisms. Google ranks these Case resources very high.

I hope you received more comments to assist with your poster than comments about your entry. But in this Web 2.0 world you will always receive both. Just look for the positive feedback in each comment.

Your title may be off center - look at it in comparison to the 2 center columns. The vertical lines makes it easier to tell. Maybe those lines should be deleted. There is a lot of text. Have you already printed a draft to see how big the lettering ends up and ability to see from a distance?

Good luck on your poster!

Thanks for your input, Brian. I think this version should have a more centered title.


Do you think it's too much text? or just a lot of text? I actually saw a poster at the ShowCASE that had a single block of text, maybe a sentence, in huge font, and the rest was images. They got a blue ribbon. I wish my images were awesome enough that they needed so little introduction, or that I was so awesome at presenting that I only needed one sentence on my poster!


For a lot of this, I've been using guidelines the library gives for posters - the proportion of text to images to whitespace and the point sizes for the font. This poster will end up being 36x56, so the sizes might seem small on the pdf. I haven't had a draft printed yet because I was hoping to get any other stylistic things hammered out first. The text is 24 point font.


As for the lines, I noticed in my senior project seminar that people pretty much fell into two camps on the lines: either liking them or not. At this point, I have a hard time not liking the lines on there because I'm used to them. I put them in there because I was afraid of people's eyes wandering around the page too much and not following the logical train I want them to. After saying that, it seems kind of silly. People should be free to gaze. This is my first poster, and I just don't know how much direction I should be giving the viewer. It's so different from a talk with slides where you can control everything that your audience sees at that moment. If you think a no lines version looks better, let me know.


Also, thanks for the blogging advice. This isn't something I do frequently and it's nice to know that people aren't just picking on me. I didn't realize that everyone who follows case blogs would find out about my little post and want to comment on it. I initially thought it was one of physics friends just giving me a hard time. The world is just too big of a place for a country girl, I suppose.

Woah, those paragraphs are really far apart... guess I didn't need to put paragraph break statements things in there. I'm learning so much today!

If you have the lines, just make sure everything lines up perfectly. If not, you have provided a simple grid that may magnify any mistakes you make in arrangement.

The amount of text would always depend on your audiences. Some groups would expect to see more than others. It would also depend how long you want people standing at your poster and if you would be present to answer questions. The only reason I wondered if there was too much text is I do not know what size the font will be when printed. You will be able to judge that when you print a draft.

Again good luck!