Jackie Shane Pride Celebration

As a graduate student, I’ve had the chance to work with a lot of neat organizations, my favorite of which has been a partnership with Jefferson Street Sound Museum (JSSM). Lorenzo Washington, their founder, was friends with legendary Jackie Shane leading up to her passing and we wanted to collaborate to do something really fantastic for Pride to honor her life.

Another part of graduate life has been fellowships and scholarships. I was fortunate to be a Curb Public Scholar at Vanderbilt, which comes with a $2,000 budget to implement some kind of public-facing piece of scholarship. I was able to leverage this budget to equip JSSM to host the first annual Jackie Shane Pride Celebration.

This was an absolute blast to plan and host and, most importantly, could not have happened without the generosity of volunteers, friends, and our planning committee.

As I wrap up my time in academia, it is fulfilling to get to put on an event that raises awareness for such a fantastic artist (read more about Jackie Shane’s story in this post), work with an awesome local museum, and create a space for queer folks to unite and celebrate during Pride.

How To Design a Scientific Poster, Part 1

In this 4-part series, I’m going to be dishing out the design details on how to take scientific ideas and communicate them in a poster without committing egregious visual sins.

There are SO many posters at so many conferences around the world that suffer from confusing colors, lack of structure, too much text, spacing problems, oversharing. I could go on. And I will.

I’ll be walking through several redesigns of a scientific poster that my cohort friends made in 2019 and we redesigned together. We’ll look at the pros and cons of their initial drafts and then examine the changes that we made together to get to the final poster.

By the end of all 4 parts, you should have a grasp on what to consider when you’re first laying out your poster and how to troubleshoot some issues that may arise as you start to add your information. In part 4, I’ll give all my best tips and include a Google Slides with some basic templates.

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Instructions I gave my cohort before we started the process:

1. Pick a color palette. Use the hex code (a 6-digit code that starts with a #) to ensure that the colors match and are consistent throughout. You can use a color picker extension with your browser (for those who use Google Chrome) and select colors from a favorite Pinterest image of a color palette. If you need some inspiration, head over here. You will use the colors to consistently and meaningfully signal related concepts throughout your poster.

2. Use the central space for your findings. We’ll get deeper into why your poster shouldn’t necessarily follow the flow of a paper, but for now it suffices to say that the middle part of your poster is what will catch most people’s eye first. Put the information you want folks to walk away with there.

3. Add a QR code. I’ve never seen a poster with too little text. But with the classic problem of too much text, you can get away with off-loading extra documents (e.g. a handout you used for the design that you want to show to poster-viewers) into a Google Folder attached to a QR code. The reason I say Google Folder is that once you’ve made a QR code with a free QR code generator, if you want to change what it links to, a drive folder is your best bet. You can use a cloud host of your choosing, but trust me when I say this solved so many potential headaches as people made edits.

4. Give your audience a visual representation of your data and/or findings to look at. It can be an image you have permission to use from your research footage or a cartoon-style strip where you reimagine the scene illustrated. It could be a large chart or flow. Whatever it is, it should more immediately communicate the idea of your poster to your audience than the text.

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Laura’s First Draft Poster

Let’s start off with what’s great here:

• Laura followed my instructions regarding choosing a color palette and putting her findings in the middle. She also has a QR code in the top right corner and has chosen to represent a scene of dramatic improvisation from the research study in stick-figure cartoon fashion for her viewers. Yay! All of these are good things.

• Laura color-coded her text as it relates to the colors of the key concepts she flagged (“variation”, “(non)rational subjectivities”, and so on).

• Laura’s references are in a small font, since only folks who really want to know the source will be reading that section, and she used endnote numbers to indicate that the text is citing a source.

Can you guess what we focused on changing?

• Laura has too much text here. She said as much when she sent it. Most often, when I work with researchers and students who are developing a poster or presentation, the text stays in draft form in a Google Doc until about a week before the product or presentation is due. This helps us make any last minute changes without having to restructure the poster (she can update it live and I can see any changes and make those in Photoshop or InDesign accordingly). Laura wanted some help paring down what she had to know what I felt as a reader was the most important for getting her point across.

• The images of the actors are inconsistent in style. Laura told me that this was actually intentional! We ended up keeping this in the final design as the movement from stick figure to outlined cartoon person was representative of the increasing complexity of character development throughout the scenes.

• The research questions are currently in two places. We only need to see them when they’re about to be answered.

• Paragraph forms of text are intimidating to readers who just walk up to your poster and want to know the gist of the research. Bullet pointing that can reduce the scary factor and invite more folks to read your poster.

Laura’s Edited Poster

You’ll probably notice that this poster immediately feels different. That’s because we created more white space and used blue-grey boxes to delineate that space. We rolled with these cute, simple speech bubbles for the headers because the resonated with the rest of the theme of the research: improvisation and speech.

• We avoided outlines at all costs. They’re just boxes that want to be filled in.

• We gave ample space between each of the elements. White space is your friend. Too much white space is overkill, but honestly I’d take that over crowded text any day.

• We stuck to columns that are about newspaper width. Your brain thinks its reading much faster when it gets to move down lines quicker; hence a newspaper doesn’t print a story straight across the full width of the page, but breaks it up into little columns to make your brain happy!

• We used the drop shadow effect and different opacities to add depth to the poster. Your brain remembers what it reads on paper better than it does in digital form. Whether you’re presenting digitally or physically, adding some depth and 3D-ness to your image will make it more legible and memorable.

• We moved the research questions to be directly over the findings that corresponded. Duh!

• We used the bottom margin of the poster’s white space to squeeze in the references. They didn’t need to be their own squared off section and putting them on the white space makes them feel more backgrounded.

• We used all caps for headings to direct the eye. We switched the body text to a serif to add some contrast and complexity to the poster without making it any more crowded.

Clever readers will catch that in this draft, the arrow for “Multiverse/Pluriverse” still needs to be made green to match its box. You’ll also notice that the cartoons were not yet added into this version because Laura was playing around with a few of the figures in a separate storyboarding program before she sent them to me for the final version.

How would you rate the readability of this poster?

Personally, I’d say it went from about a 3 to at least a 7 or 8. Some of the text lines are a little bulky, but in a way that we were ok with when we went to print. You can’t win ‘em all, especially when the words you’re using are super long or you have to explain in-depth a gnarly theoretical concept.

xo,

em

5 Essentials to Include in Every Service Quote (plus a free download!)

When I started freelancing in college, I had zero idea what I was doing. I mean, c’est la vie, no? That’s how most of us digital folks start out. But I’ve learned a lot in the last decade or so about the dos and don’ts of running your own business and providing digital services and products. I’ve always loved getting started on new projects and turning around quotes to clients, working to find a timeline that suits us both. Here are five things that you must include in your quote as a professional designer. Plus, scroll down to find a services quote template I created just for you.

1. Your contact hours

Having your contact information and theirs on a quote is pretty standard stuff. But adding indicating your preferred contact methods and including your hours of availability? This is clutch! Just because you’re a freelancer or a small business does not mean that you are on call. You’re not in emergency medicine. You do not wear a pager (your cell phone is not an appendage). Put your work hours on your quote and indicate how long you take to respond to inquiries. It’s called boundaries.

2. Separate line items for taxes

While you’re itemizing all of your services and associated costs, it’s important to clarify how taxes come into play. Make sure you create a subtotal for all service items, then add a line item for your state taxes that apply to sale of goods and services (in Tennessee, it’s a whopping 9.25% so it’s especially important to be up front about the cost this adds). This way, your client knows that you’re not up-charging them randomly and you’ve got your taxes covered rather than having to take them out of your overall income.

3. Payment schedule and options

Life happens. People forget that they were supposed to put that check in the mail or that the project is nearly done and it’s time to pay up to receive the goods. My solution? Include a payment schedule with your quote. I tend to ask for a 25% deposit upon signing of the quote, then 25% upon delivery; the middle 50% can be split up however you like. If you have a client who needs a payment plan, this is the place to work that out. Clear payment schedules help you and your client be on the same page and avoid any awkwardness around the exchange.

4. Terms and conditions of delivery

If you don’t stipulate (aka plan ahead), you’ll be stuck wishing you had. I’ve been here. Learn from my mistakes! Include something about when your payments are due and what happens if they’re late. Include something about your right to revise the quote if the project exceeds the original scope of work (this tends to be—and should be—an ongoing conversation with the client). Then don’t forget a piece about termination of work (if it doesn’t work out). You might also consider including who owns the rights to templates, images, or photos used or produced as a part of the work. You could even put something in there about your editing policy. Personally, I find folks notice a misspelled name, need to add one more team biography, or want to adjust the color of something within a week of delivery.

5. A space for both parties to sign

This is an essential component that I didn’t start including until I ran into issues with the above sections (really, payment and scope of work, but those are war stories for another time). Sign on the line, baby! It’s a helpful tool to have even if it’s a formality. Plus, we like when everything is official.

Additional Items to Include:

I’ll detail more about these in a future post, but here are some options that I’ve included depending on the project:

• Change of leadership clause: if you’re working with a client on an on-going basis and the company structure changes significantly on their side, it’s important to have an opportunity to reassess the relationship and know with whom you’d be working as a contractor or freelancer.

• Timeline: If it’s a larger project (50+ hours), I include a timeline of when we’ll have meetings or check-in points along the way, what I expect to be done when, and when their “homework” (photos from a staff page shoot, etc.) are due to me so that I can work with them.

• Artwork release: Who owns what is always important! Protect yourself and your client in copyright terms by clarifying who can use what images are produced as a part of the project and for what future uses.

• Design draft fee: No good designer works on spec (speculation). Creative work isn’t free! If you’re a client thinking of hiring a designer for a larger project and you want to see a draft of what they could concoct for you, expect to agree to pay a design draft fee (anywhere from $50 for t-shirts to $500 for murals) before you sign the quote. This is like the Costco sample situation: the samples are provided after you’ve paid the Costco membership, but before you purchase the official item.

• Discounts and referrals: I love being able to provide my services at a discount to nonprofits and ministries that typically have a limited budget. They get high quality work at a price they can afford and I get to offer in-kind discount services as a part of my tax-deductible donation. My discount rates are pro-rated depending on the size of the project. You can also include a referral discount (if another client sends this one your way) or a first-time client discount (on smaller projects, I do 10% off which nicely offsets the tax rate for them, but still leaves me with a fair price for the value of my work).

Is this a lot of information? Looking for somewhere to start?

Lucky you! I’ve made you a template!