Thank you for reviewing for DIS 2025 Pictorials. We have written this guide to assist you in writing your review, since in the past there has been uncertainty around what a pictorial is and how to assess it.
What is a Pictorial?
Please consult the Call for Pictorials for general information about pictorials.
General Notes on Reviewing
We highly recommend reviewers & ACs to read Ken Hinckley’s blog post and commentary about reviewing and serving as program committee member.
Below summary is paraphrasing or directly quoting Ken Hinckley. We encourage you to read the full text.
What makes for a good review?
Positive Attitude: Your job as reviewer or AC is not to seek out flaws and kill papers but to discover new interesting work, usher it into the literature, and give constructive feedback to authors.
Ask yourself whether a paper’s real and significant problem is a fatal flaw or can it be addressed by reframing, justifying, or discussing a result.
Substance: A good review should be several paragraphs long, not just a couple of sentences, even and especially if the Pictorial is great. You need to discuss the weaknesses and limitations in a positive manner, but also call out the strengths and utility of the work. A content-free positive review can easily be disregarded by more critical reviewers during the discussion phase.
New Perspectives: The best reviews raise new perspectives on the contribution and propose new connections to literature.
A good review raises smart and tough questions which the authors can then address in their revisions; or it raises fresh considerations or new aspects of a design space that the authors hadn’t fully fleshed out; or makes suggestions for how the authors could improve the articulation or organization of their work.
A positive attitude to help authors address correctable mistakes and oversights does not mean to accept poor quality, wrong, or misleading Pictorials, or work that lacks any meaningful research contribution.
Guiding Questions for Reviewing Pictorials
When writing your Pictorial review, please consider the following questions:
- Does the Pictorial make a contribution to DIS/HCI communities (and beyond) and state its contribution clearly? A pictorial’s contribution needs to be a research contribution on par with a paper, but the contribution could be more visual, artistic, or creative.
- Are images/diagrams emphasized over text as the primary means of communicating the research contribution?
- Is the Pictorial well-situated, framed and well referenced within DIS and HCI especially, and outside of HCI where needed? (but please note: it is not necessary to reference everything about visual presentation that has ever been advanced by any discipline)
- Does the work take advantage of the Pictorial format, or would it be clearer in a more text-based form?
- Does the Pictorial represent a visual quality (image quality, layout, typography) high enough to convey the message of the submission in an engaging and effective way? Pictorials do not have to follow a particular visual style, but they should use visuals effectively and intentionally as an integral part of the contribution.
- Does every visual component (image, diagram, picture etc.) used in the Pictorial play a meaningful role and clearly present the idea on its own or with the support of text?
- Does the text and visual components of the pictorial support each other well in weaving the main argument/s of the pictorial? Pictorials that merely put paragraph text next to images are typically considered less effective.
- Are the implications for HCI and/or interaction design clear? These may be analytic, generative, synthesis-oriented, and even manifestos.
A Note on Formatting and Visual Style
We take a liberal stance on formatting and visual style – one of the strengths of the pictorial format is the creativity it allows authors to play with structure and visual elements that are rigid in traditional paper formats. Rather than adherence to a template, it is more important that the visual style is engaging, coherent, and accessible. Authors are encouraged to make creative use of images and graphical elements and choose fonts and formatting styles freely. However, we do require the following minimum criteria to be met:
- The first page must contain the title, authors and their affiliations, author keywords, CCS concepts, and abstract. For the camera-ready version, there must also be space for the ACM rights box.
- Page format must be US letter
- Pictorial must not be longer than 12 pages excluding references
- Text needs to be legible (consider font size and contrast)
- While graphical elements can reach into margin areas, text should generally fit within these minimum margins: Top: 2.54 cm (1 in), Bottom: 2.1 cm (0.83 in), Left and Right: 1.3 cm (0,51 in). Exceptions may be granted if the visual style requires this.
Gross violations of these criteria will have been desk rejected. However, if you are reviewing a pictorial that does not meet these criteria, please request appropriate changes to be made in the revision.
DIS 2025 Pictorial Program Committee
- Noura Howell, Georgia Tech
- Sebastian Prost, Northumbria University
- Sabrina Scuri, Politecnico di Milano