Context
Who: researchers presenting at a conference and readers of the printed report. Jobs: read the argument from two meters (poster) and from arm's length (report); cite and archive the PDF. Constraints: one fixed canvas, no hover or focus, no reflow, a print pipeline that flattens transparency and converts color. One system covers both formats through a shared grid, type scale, and ink palette.
Principles
| Rule | Rationale |
|---|---|
| Fix the canvas, then design to it | Nothing reflows; margins, trim, and bleed are tokens, and text never enters the trim or fold. |
| One grid serves every page type | Cover, body, figure, and table pages differ in pattern, not in underlying structure. |
| Hierarchy is size and weight first | Color is secondary; the argument must survive a grayscale print and a black-and-white photocopy. |
| Type is sized for the viewing distance | Poster type is read at two meters, report type at arm's length; stating the distance makes the scale checkable. |
| Print color is a production decision | CMYK ranges, tint thresholds, and paper assumptions are declared; screen preview is labeled as a preview. |
Poster
A2 at true proportion: one screen-size proof, not a sampler. Headline read at two meters; body at one meter; the grid overlay shows the shared 3-column structure.
Nine months after the dike breach: sediment, salt, and the return of the reed belt
Question
Does the breached dike self-heal through sediment capture, or does the marsh convert to open water within the first two seasons?
Method
- 36 fixed transects, sampled monthly
- Drone photogrammetry at 4 cm/px
- Salinity loggers at three depths
Result
Figure 1 — mean sediment accretion, cm · reed cover returns faster on the sheltered side.
Accretion reached 3.1 cm by November, exceeding the regional threshold for reed establishment in 7 of 9 months.
Conclusion
A self-healing trajectory is plausible but not yet stable: the breach throat widened during the two largest storms.
Reader path
Scan order: title → figure 1 → “3.1 cm” → conclusion. Everything else is depth for the specialist.
Report pages
A4 pages at true proportion: cover and body. The body carries the declared measure, a table, a figure caption, and a folio — the repeating units of the system.
Nine months after the dike breach
Abstract. The 2024 dike breach opened a 120 m throat in the north marsh. This report tracks sediment accretion, salinity, and reed cover across nine months of monthly sampling, and concludes that recovery is real but not yet stable: storm widening of the throat remains the dominant risk to the trajectory.
Accretion at the sheltered transects reached 3.1 cm by November, while exposed transects lagged at 1.4 cm. The difference tracks the wave-energy budget more closely than the salinity record, which stayed within the reed tolerance band for all nine months.
62-character measure · body 10.5 pt / 1.45| Transect group | Accretion | Reed cover |
|---|---|---|
| Sheltered (n = 21) | 3.1 cm | 38% |
| Exposed (n = 15) | 1.4 cm | 12% |
| Throat edge (n = 6) | 0.6 cm | 4% |
| Storm damage (unrecovered) | — | — |
Table 1 — means over nine months. Cells with no data show an em dash, never a zero.
Page furniture
The repeating components of the system: running head, folio, caption, callout, table rule, and pull quote. Each is defined once and reused across both formats.
Running head + folio
Same type size and rule weight on every page; the folio never carries content.
Callout
One number, one claim — the figure must also read without the callout.
Caption
Figure 1 — mean sediment accretion, cm · reed cover returns faster on the sheltered side.
States the takeaway, not only the axes; numbered in one sequence across both formats.
Table rule + pull quote
| Sheltered (n = 21) | 3.1 cm |
| Exposed (n = 15) | 1.4 cm |
“Recovery is real but not yet stable.”
Color and print
Every color token carries its print values. Conversions are naive preview values — the printer's profile is authoritative — and the palette is checked for grayscale separation before it is shipped.
Screen preview only · deliverables are exported with the declared profile, and no semantic role depends on a hue that disappears in grayscale.
Typography and measure
One serif family for the whole system — Newsreader, optical sizes for display and for small print — with weight rather than hue carrying hierarchy.
| Role | Face | Print size | Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poster title | Newsreader 600 | 72–96 pt | read at 2 m |
| Poster body | Newsreader 400 | 24–28 pt | read at 1 m |
| Report heading | Newsreader 600 | 18–24 pt | page structure |
| Report body | Newsreader 400 | 10.5 pt / 1.45 | arm's length, 62-character measure |
| Kicker, labels, folios | Newsreader 600 · tracked caps | 8–9 pt | captions, folios, running heads |
| Print metadata | Mono | 7.5 pt | colophon, profile, revision |
Interaction, motion, accessibility
No interaction and no motion — by design
- Interaction states — hover, focus, press, and disabled do not exist on paper. Their equivalent is the page-type grammar: a reader can tell cover, body, figure, and table apart at a glance, and clear cross-references replace affordances.
- Motion — none. The artifact does not move; page-turn and reveal behavior belongs to the reader or the PDF viewer, never to the design.
- States become page types and extremes — cover, body, full-bleed figure, table, colophon; a 140-character title wraps to three lines; an empty table cell shows an em dash; a wide table moves to a landscape page rather than compressing.
- Reading order — tagged structure defines the order a screen reader and the PDF export will follow: title, authors, abstract, sections, captions, footnotes.
Accessibility
- Every figure carries alternative text and a caption that states the takeaway, not only the axes.
- Ink-on-paper contrast is measured for the actual paper stock; body text stays below the 80% tint line at text sizes.
- The PDF export preserves tags, reading order, and document language.
Verification
- Grayscale proof: switch the proof above and confirm hierarchy and the figure remain readable without color.
- Grid overlay: confirm every page shares one grid and one margin; text never enters the trim.
- Print values: every token lists hex and naive CMYK; the printer's profile is declared in the colophon.
- Proportion: sheets render at true aspect ratio, so a wrong canvas is visible immediately.