Gill and Giovanna met online to discuss the example PIS, which was almost complete. Gil had added flat colour to all of the images and drawn additional images where necessary. There was one image still outstanding – another version of a clinician talking with a patient – that Gill wanted to make, rather than re-using an existing image twice in the PIS. Giovanna was happy with all of the other images that had been added and with the general layout of the PIS as an A4 document. Two of these images are shown in the header image. All of the images created for the example PIS, together with images of the page layouts, can be seen here. This includes slightly revised versions of the example PIS modules created in December 2020.
Gill had some concerns on how easy it would be to recreate the PIS in Microsoft Word, particularly for scientists unfamiliar with graphic design principles. Word is not the best software to use when integrating text and image, and Gill had used Adobe InDesign to create the example PIS. It was agreed that the best option would be to recreate the example PIS in a 16:9 PowerPoint file, as this would be much easier for scientists to edit and adapt than a Word document. At some point, Gill will try and create a version in Word format, and perhaps create some guidelines for scientists on how to create the PIS in Word.
There was also some discussion of how the colour-coding would work for readers who were colour-blind, or if the PIS was printed out in black and white. Gill had chosen the blue and orange colours from the King’s colour palette because they should be distinguishable for those with red-green colour-blindness (although this has yet to be checked). When viewed in greyscale, the blue colour is a darker tone than the orange and it should be possible to distinguish between the two.
Following the meeting, Gill completed the pdf file for the example PIS and Giovanna submitted it to the FAST-R team for a final review. Meanwhile, there has been much interest from Giovanna’s colleagues at the CNS and Dr Yannis Paloyelis (who worked with Gill on her PhD research in 2018) has asked if he could use elements of the illustrative PIS for an upcoming imaging study. Giovanna and Gill arranged to meet online with Yannis on 25th March.
Neuroscience & graphic design 