Academic Posters

Introduction

An academic poster, also referred to as a poster session, is a visual representation of your research. Posters may be shared internally within your department at a final exam session or for a wider audience, such as an academic conference.

Posters are typically multi-modal with text, images, and graphs/charts/statistics. When developing a poster, you should make your main points visually appealing and attractive to someone that may be walking by. You want your key ideas to stand out and catch their attention.

Once you are able to captivate your audience, you can view your poster as a communication tool. You can answer questions and provide additional background information on your research.

Posters are an excellent avenue for displaying organized research to an audience.

Elements of a Poster

Your poster should include these elements:

• Title
• Author(s), with affiliations and emails

If your poster is a representation of a research study, you will want to include the following sections:

• Introduction or objective
• Methods
• Results
• Conclusions and/or discussion
• Acknowledgements

If your poster is a representation of an event or other kind of project, you may want to forego formal abstract sections in favor of the 5 Ws:

• Who (introduce the author, organization, or community)
• What (what did you do? how did you do it?)
• Where (where did you do it?)
• When (when did it take place?)
• Why (what are the outcomes, implications, or future possibilities?)
• Acknowledgements

 

First off, let’s make clear what a poster is not.

A poster is not a bottomless pit where you dump all of your data and technical lingo. Only carefully selected information and visuals should go into your poster. I know you have eight fancy 3D plots that you can’t wait to share with the world, but ask yourself, are they really necessary? Do you really need eight of them when just one would do the trick?

Now let’s talk about what a poster should be instead.

Above all, a poster should be a networking tool. The primary purpose of a poster is not to communicate every little detail of your fantastic research, but rather to attract people’s attention and serve as a conversation starter. Think about the typical conference poster session; it’s at the end of the day, and there is often a copious amount of alcohol in the mix. Seriously, after a long day of presentations, no one wants to read walls of text as the wine kicks in. What they want is for you to share the story of your research and engage in informal conversation about it. Repeat after me: a poster is a conversation starter. And the poster is not going to do the talking for you.

Second, a poster is a communication tool. A poster should use visuals to draw people in from a distance. Then, as people step closer and begin reading it, go ahead and give the background information necessary so that they can put your work into context, understand what you have done, why you have done it, and come to realise its broader impact.

Process for Developing a Poster

Step 1 – Scripting

Before you consider opening PowerPoint, or any other design software, open Microsoft Word. Any word processor will do, but make sure that it has the ability to track your word count and check your spelling.

Target audience: ask yourself, who is my ideal audience for this poster? Is it other experts in your field, or perhaps the broader public? What is their level of understanding of the subject? This is an important question because if you put a bit of effort into making your poster understandable to the broader public, you automatically increase your potential audience and impact. Also consider that a poster written in plain English works with both experts and non-experts alike, while technical and complicated writing greatly limits your potential audience.

Bullet points: a poster should not look like a paper, therefore, bullet points are your friend. 200-word paragraphs on a poster would discourage even the most motivated, sober, and caffeinated conference attendant. Bullet points on the other hand are a lot less frightening. There is a trend among some academics to slap a solid 200-or-so word abstract right at the top of their posters. Let me set the record straight. This has to stop. Your whole poster is a visual abstract, so it makes no sense whatsoever to put a solid block of text that no one is going to read at the top of your poster. Exception: If you’re ashamed of how terrible your data are and you don’t want people to look at your poster, then go for it, put that abstract at the top. It’ll do a wonderful job at keeping people at a safe distance!

Use sections with headers: because we are writing with the reader in mind, we want to make the logical flow of the sections as easy as possible for the viewer to follow. My advice is to have large, easy-to-read and numbered sections that cover the main pillars of the story, which typically are:

1. Background

2. Questions/knowledge gap

3. Methods (keep this to the bare minimum or skip it if you can)

4. Results

5. Conclusions

6. References and acknowledgements (smaller at the bottom)

Fewer words: I know this is going to shock many of you, but you should keep your word count under 250 in total. Possibly <150 words. I’m serious. The harsh reality is that if your poster is wordy, people will ignore it. Less is definitely more.

Step 2 – Concept

Here is where the fun starts. Grab a piece of paper, or open up your design software, and make a first draft.

Layout and size: vertical or horizontal? You better check with the conference organisers, as you don’t want to show up at the conference with a poster that doesn’t fit the panels. A0 (841 x 1189 mm or 33.1 x 46.8 inches) is a good standard size to start. Keep in mind that when you design posters, it’s always safer to downsize than to upsize, as upsizing a digital image based on a pixel grid will inevitably cause a loss of resolution.

Panels: how do we read; left to right or right to left? Top-down or bottom-up? It may seem obvious, but I always see posters that are visually confusing and don’t have a clear directional flow. Start with an enlarged and readable title right at the top, then create a simple layout of panels that make it easy for the viewer to navigate. Remember that we’re committed to keep the reader in mind, so use arrows and numbered headers to help them out.

Leave space at the edges: It’s important to leave some blank space around the edges for a couple of reasons. First, you don’t want to risk important information to be cut off when printing, and second, you don’t want your poster to feel cluttered. This blank space is also known as negative space, and we’re going to unpack this concept more in the next section.

Step 3 – Design

Negative space: for some strange reason, many academics feel the need to cover every inch of their poster with text or images. This is the wrong idea! It’s bad because it makes it difficult for the viewer to find the relevant information and to rest their eye.

Eye-catching visuals: imagine you’re walking around a poster session, and you’re far enough away from the posters that you can’t read titles or graphs. What will compel you to walk towards a particular poster? It’ll likely be a recognisable image that grabs your attention. Without a big and recognisable image, your poster will look like a fuzzy wall of text and it will likely go unnoticed. Therefore, it’s smart to include one big visual that’s related to your research and has the ability to hook people in from a distance. Be it a rocket, a lion, or an octopus — what matters is that it’s there.

Step 4 – Getting your poster ready for print

Get feedback: you’ve designed your masterpiece. Awesome! Congratulations! Now it’s time to get feedback from your supervisor and/or colleagues before printing it. Ask them to proofread it too. And remember that people are busy, so do this well in advance, as printing often takes longer than you’d imagine.

Dummy: before spending money printing your poster, you really want to make a dummy as a final check. Print your poster A4, or even better A3 size if you can, and triple-check that important information isn’t too close to the margins. You’re likely going to put your picture in a corner, so you want to ensure your face isn’t going to get cut in half!

Color profile: if you designed your poster with professional software, you’ll have the ability to control the color profile. Nothing complicated, there are two options: RGB and CMYK. The first one is for digital use, and the second one is for printing — pick the second one. That’s all you need to know.

Resolution: if you designed your poster big enough from the start (e.g. A0), you should be alright. As a rule of thumb, your resolution for high-quality printing posters and images should be around 300 dpi (dots per inch).

Final Checklist

• Can you read the title from several feet away?
• Did you include all relevant sections?
• Are authors listed? With contact information?
• Make sure it’s clear when your research was done: did you include a date in your Methods section?
• Double check your images at 100% resolution
• Double check the labels on your figures and tables
• Did you acknowledge your funding source?
• Did you save your poster as a PDF? In PowerPoint, you can do this using the Save As dialog box (choose PDF from the drop down menu)

Summary

Academic posters are a method of displaying research findings in a visual manner. Typically on display at conferences, posters draw in an audience and allow for back-and-forth dialogue between the person presenting the research and anyone that has questions or would benefit from additional context.

When developing a poster, you should consider visually appealing methods for drawing in your audience. Your main points should stand out and content should be concise.

Sources:

“How to design an award-winning conference poster.” By The London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved from: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/11/how-to-design-an-award-winning-conference-poster/ Licensed under: CC-BY

“Poster Presentations.” By UCLA Library. Retrieved from: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/c.php?g=223540&p=1480858 Licensed under: CC-BY

“Final Checklist.” By UCLA Library. Retrieved from: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/c.php?g=223540&p=1480863 Licensed under: CC-BY