A Short Guide to Creating a Poster for a Conference

Introduction

Presenting a poster at a conference or meeting is a great way to share your work with other researchers. Poster sessions can often feel like the academic equivalent of a busy street market: there are lots of people milling around in crowds, hundreds of conversations happening at once, and a huge range of potential things to do and see. Each researcher’s poster operates like their market stall — trying to set out what’s on offer and entice people in. A great poster is key in getting the most out of these sessions. Whilst making one doesn’t require too much design knowledge or expertise, there are a few important factors that you should consider. So, in this post, we’ll walk you through some tips on how to produce the perfect poster.

The conference and your poster

First things first, what sort of event are you taking this poster to? Is it the Biennial International Conference of your entire field, taking place across half a city somewhere on the other side of the planet with 25,000 attendees? Is it a symposium of the 32 researchers in a remote area of Canada who all study duck ecology and you’ve already met half of them? The level of assumed knowledge in the audience should heavily influence how you choose to display any images or information on your poster.

For example, if everyone in the poster session is part of a small technical meeting on transient absorption spectroscopy methods, then having a graph with the y-axis label of ‘ΔOD’ will be fine. If the poster session is for anybody interested in solar panels at a mega-conference on climate change, then you should label the y-axis ‘Effectiveness at converting photons into electrons (ΔOD)’. You could also put helpful arrows showing that a higher peak means a larger number of electrons and a longer tail indicates less decay. When people visit your poster, the less time you have to spend explaining what the acronyms and jargon on your poster mean, the more time you can spend discussing your results and analysis. In essence, think about the conference and the attendees, then make the necessary alterations.

What are you going to show?

This part should be easy, as a few months ago you will have submitted a title and abstract to the event organisers. Now you’ve been accepted you should think about the 2 or 3 points you want all visitors to your poster to come away with. Topics that are common to present in posters are new results or discoveries that you’ve made or a new method, or device that you and your research group have developed. Quite often you might produce a poster that presents the results that you have recently published in a paper.

Whatever it is you are trying to present, think about the three or four key visual elements that can help you convey this message. Typically these will be graphs, pictures, flowcharts or spectra. Ideally, you will have one visual element that explains the motivation for the work, one that shows your method, and then two or three that support your conclusion. How we display these images will depend on who we’re showing them to.

How to lay everything out

First impressions are important. With 100s of posters in a room, make sure people want to stop at yours, so your poster needs to be an eye-catcher.

Before you make an eye-catching poster, you need to make sure that you are following the basics. So, first things first, check how large your poster board is going to be and double check if your poster has to be presented either portrait or landscape. It’s hard to look like a thorough and considerate researcher if you can’t follow a simple set of instructions from an event organiser. If it fits in with the conference rules, I generally prefer to present my work landscape because a) most people present portrait so it makes my work stand out a bit more b) titles take up fewer lines and c) I’m usually presenting data where I have a longer x-axis than y-axis, so I can make my graphs bigger this way. This won’t apply or appeal to everyone though, so do what suits you, your research and the conference best.

The next step in laying out your poster is to put the title and abstract in, and then position your images on the page. I’d probably go for the image supporting my motivation in the top left, and the image supporting my conclusion in the bottom right. Blow the images up so they’re as big as they can be on the page that’s without looking ridiculous. The remaining white space is what you’ve got left to play with in terms of text.

One considerate thing you can do, and this applies to any poster session you go to, is to make sure everything you show passes a colour-blindness checker. If you’ve got two things that are supposed to look distinct from each other, make sure they do to everyone.

Laying out your poster will come with experience. With each poster session that you attend, try and get a feel for the positive and negative reactions of not only your poster but for others too. Whilst the content on your poster is the most important aspect, perfecting its style will come with time and experience.

Putting in the text

Size 24pt font for “body” text, >60pt for headings and >80pt for the title. Use a serif font for the body text, and sans serif for titles. Try not to use more than two fonts though, so if you’re making your graphs in Origin, your structures in ChemDraw, your spectra in Mestrenova and your presentation in PowerPoint, you’re already going to have four separate default fonts. Take the time to make everything match up. You want everything to look as neat and as consistent as possible.

Now if you take only one piece of advice from the piece, make it this:Don’t write in continuous prose anywhere outside the abstract, just stick with bullet points.

You’re going to be standing by your poster, so if anyone wants any points expanding on, you’ll be there do that. As with every other element on the poster: remember who the majority of the audience is going to be, and tailor your language so it conveys the most information to the audience with the least effort. There’s no need to waste time explaining stuff to people who already know it, and there’s no point in using jargon that will slow a person without prior knowledge understanding your conclusion. Your poster should be able to convey most of its message through visual elements alone. Make your graphs clear and appealing, and then you won’t need lots of text to get your point across.

And Finally

Take business cards and remember to place your email on the bottom of your poster. You should also take a few A4 printouts of your poster. If your poster is a summary of your most recent paper, take a few print-outs of that too. If anyone has lots of questions and is hogging your stand for too long you can hand them a copy of the paper and your card. Tell them to email you, and move them on. Likewise, if someone you want to do a postdoc or collaboration with shows some interest, get them reading your work and remembering your name.

Key points to take away

• No matter the prior knowledge of the person that you are presenting to, you are effectively selling them your work. So be enthusiastic. If you don’t act enthusiastically, how can they be enthusiastic about your work?
• Start with the visuals, and make them easy to understand for your audience
• Use bullet points only for your text
• Keep fonts consistent, a little effort goes a long way in terms of neatness
• Have business cards and print-outs to share

Author: Dr Matt Allinson

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