Example of bad scientific poster

When I give lectures on poster design, I’m always torn whether to show examples of horrific posters I’ve found on the internet (there are thousands to choose from).  Someday, I know, the author of that awful poster is going to be in the audience, probably in the front row, and probably carrying a concealed weapon.  So I thought it was time to construct one for my “Designing conference posters” page. My poster on “Pigs in space: effect of zero gravity and ad libitum feeding on weight gain in Cavia porcellus” is what I came up with. I even designed some bad logos for the monstrosity (details are in the Acknowledgements, if you want to know more).  Believe it or not, the poster got published in the journal Nature.

If you want to view a large version, here you go: bad-scientific-poster-example.jpg.

Some reasons for its badness:

1. Background image is distracting, wastes ink.
2. Text box backgrounds are dark, which makes text hard to read (and wastes ink).
3. Text box backgrounds are all different colors, for no reason (thus annoying).
4. Text boxes are different widths (and annoying).
5. Text boxes not separated from each other by pleasing “white” space.
6. Text box edges not aligned, which is annoying.
7. Text justified, which causes bad inter-word spacing. Also makes reading harder (brain uses jaggedness of left-justified text).
8. Logos are pretentious (true of any logo).
9. Logos crowd the title.
10. Title perspective is annoying (unless you like Star Wars).
11. Title is in all caps, which is harder to read and obscures Latin name).
12. Title is italicized, which obscures Latin name.
13. Author font and color is annoying (comic sans should be reserved for comic books).
14. Author font color is too loud relative to other text.
15. Too much text.
16. Results are presented in sentences instead of visually with charts.
17. Section headers have more than one type of formatting (big font, bolded, italicized, underlined, and colored — ack!).  Choose one. [Note: I forgot to number the sections...that would have been even worse.]
18. Terrible graphic of Guinea pig on scale.  Need one of the actual set up (pigs eating while weightless, for example). [UPDATE: Or should have bribed Jeff at joegp.com, who apparently has a comic series about Guinea pigs in space suits. Awesome]
19. Inclusion of an Abstract gobbles up space needlessly.  Abstract section should be banned from posters.
20. Plus the science is terrible!  (Bad science is correlated with bad graphic design, by the way.)