Example project - Step 5
The real work – your own idea
Poster (Blank Canvas Method)
Getting inspiration
Before making my final sketch for the poster I search for inspiration and ideas by using several methods described in this Step. The method that helped me the most was making a visual mood board in Pinterest. You can find this mood board on nl.pinterest.com/dirmafirma/science-poster-project. Besides this I made a mind map of the poster topic, to try out if this brought me to new ideas and a different way of approaching the topic. For me, making a mood board worked best. I use this method most of the time for a lot of my projects.
These methods, and others, are shown here below (brainstorm, mindmap part 1, mindmap part 2, 7clicks.org, Wordnik Relate):
Sketching
When I start a project I always start making rough sketches, with all the ideas that come to mind or that I get from for example the Pinterest mood board. When I know which direction I want to go, I start making the final sketch.
For the poster the topic was the study of the genetic architecture of the cerebellum (little brain). ‘Architecture’ was one of the words that brought me to analogies such as ‘building’ and ‘patterns’ (as in: where does the cerebellum architecture consist of?). See here one of the sketches I made.
I thought about a simpler approach for the poster, by just showing the cerebellum in all its beauty on it and to show the key findings etcetera around it.
The third approach was a more data oriented one (Fig below). In her research Elleke uses a Manhattan plot, a type of data visualization that is used a lot in genetic research. When looking for inspiration I found out that there are circular Manhattan plots, a great and appealing way to use on a poster!
Final sketch
I worked out the ‘architecture/blocks’ idea and the circular Manhattan plot idea to a final sketch. I left out the simpler approach, because in my opinion it was not a very original idea. For all ideas I first created the layout and then integrated the visuals and text.
Feedback from Elleke
When discussing the sketches we rather quickly came to the conclusion the circular Manhattan plot would work great on the poster and would show in an appealing way the main findings of the research. This was a data visualization type Elleke could make (program), of course important, so we decided to go for that one. The only thing we added to this sketch was the ‘How/Methods’ part. Each part of this section would contain some textual explanation.
Poster (Template Method)
For this method I used the circular Manhattan plot I used in the Blank Canvas Method. Besides this visual, no further sketch was needed, because the design was already defined by the template I would use.