Guidelines for Making a Research Poster
"It takes intelligence, even brilliance, to condense and focus information into a clear, simple presentation that will be read and remembered. Ignorance and arrogance are shown in a crowded, complicated, hard-to-read poster."
Mary Helen Briscoe
Poster Presentations
Presenting your research at scientific conferences or university research fairs often involves participation in a “poster session.” A scientific poster for a poster session is a large document to communicate your research. Since the average time spent in front of a poster is 30 seconds, and rarely will anyone spend longer than 3 minutes looking at the poster, you need to be able to catch and keep their attention and say what you want to say very quickly. Your entire poster, including all text and figure/graphics legends, should take under 10 minutes to fully read (preferably well under!). Posters with 800 words or less are ideal (Purrington, 2006). The intent is to keep it simple and focused on one main idea – this is not your complete thesis or dissertation (but may focus on a portion of your research related to such a document). In most poster situations you will be standing beside your poster during the session, available to answer questions and discuss your research more deeply with anyone interested, so although your poster should be able to stand on its own, it neither needs to nor should be a thorough description of your research.
Don't get too technical – at a scientific conference most of your viewers will be in other branches of your field, and at a university research fair most of your viewers will be in other fields altogether. A poster that is detailed enough for the scientist in the field still can be written to be understood by the lay person. It may be more difficult, but the extra work (in conjunction with it being visually appealing and otherwise following guidelines for good poster design) will probably pay off in more people spending more time at your poster.
This poster may be either a single page 4 to 5 feet wide by 3-4 feet tall, or a series of ~8½" x 11" 'slides.' We have access to a color poster printer available for your use at minimal cost (currently $5 for up to a ~48" x 42" sheet), so the remainder of this discussion on posters will focus on preparing a single large poster, although these principles can be easily adapted to creating a poster from individual 8½" x 11" pages.
Guidelines for Designing a Poster
Organization: What to include on the poster
The scientific poster, like research papers, is composed of several sections: Title, Introduction, Theory/Methodology, Results, Discussion and/or Conclusion, Further Work (optional), References and Acknowledgments. Usually you don't need to include an abstract on the poster (but check the specifications for your poster session). Any good source technical writing guide will discuss the research paper design/writing, so only visual specifics for these sections are detailed here. The word counts listed should generally be considered as maximums, and, because they add up to over 1000 words with title, legends and references, you should seriously consider trimming one or more sections if they all meet (or exceed) these guidelines.
Title section – This includes the title of your research – usually one line, never more than two! – as well as the names of the people involved in the work and your/their affiliations. The title should be in “title case” or “sentence case” rather than all capitals, and should state or hint at an interesting issue and/or experimental approach, and include the study organism, if appropriate. Try to make it “catchy” to reel in the passersby, but not cliché or trite.
Introduction – Get your viewer interested in the research you're working on. Why is this research important? (≤200 words)
Materials/Methods – an overview of your experimental methods set-up, and a description of organisms and procedures used (≤200 words)
Results – presentation of your data – include charts and graphs as appropriate. (≤200 words, not counting figure legends)
Conclusion/Discussion – insightful discussion of those results – what did you learn from the data? (≤300 words)
Further Work – (optional) where do these results and conclusion(s) lead you to study next?
References – (published articles relevant to your research and cited on your poster – use no more than 10!)
Acknowledgments – for any financial or other assistance for your research. (≤40 words)
Contact/Further Information – if you want to leave an e-mail, website – such as a link to a PDF version of the poster, or a link to the specific research you're doing that links to the poster (and edit the autoformatting so the URL is not blued or underlined), or other way for the viewer to obtain further information or contact you. (≤20 words)
General formatting guidelines
Although there can be significant variation in formatting, these guidelines will help you start out, and shouldn't be strayed too far from without specific intention to gain a particular effect.
Graphics
Use graphics! Photographs, line art or computer renderings, and charts/graphs can help your poster get noticed. Your poster has to get noticed to get read. Ideas include how equipment set-ups work or what part of the organism is being studied, and graphs of your results. Make sure photographs are as high quality as you can obtain – graphics taken from the web, for example, are optimized for loading quickly and will be badly pixelated when blown up to poster size – and for charts and graphs use the most eye-catching style that works with the data you are trying to present. Add a thin gray or black border around graphics to help them stand out, but don't overwhelm them.
Because photographs are “pixel map” graphics (e.g.: .jpg, .gif, .tif, .bmp), beginning with high-resolution files is the only way to create detailed figures when enlarged for poster presentation. For posters, nothing under 300dpi (dots per inch) is recommended. This is the only part of your poster that can change drastically between looking at it on an 8½" x 11" piece of paper and enlarged to poster size. To check how it will look printed, on your computer screen view the poster at 100% and scroll around to view each picture (you may not see all of the photo on the screen), and ask yourself if a viewer would want to look at that picture (you should also ask if it even resembles what it's supposed to, especially with lower-quality graphics!). If the figures don't look good, regenerate the information, if possible, or get better-quality photos. If you can't, you might try “smoothing” the graphic with a high-quality graphics software program. For other graphics besides photos (charts and graphs, computer-rendered drawings, etc.), it is recommended to use a “vector graphics” format (e.g.: .eps, .ps, .pdf) whenever possible. These formats support resizing the graphic to almost any size, large or small, without losing detail. If you cannot save to one of these kinds of formats, follow the guidelines above for photos in order to get the best detail you can.
Do not use all capitals for titles or axis labels for charts and graphs and, when space allows, align the Y-axis label horizontally (Purrington, 2006). Distinguish graph lines with different symbols and/or line styles, as well as different colors, and bar graphs, pie charts, etc. with different intensities of different colors – a significant percentage of the populace (8% of males and 0.5% of females - or even higher!) (Purrington, 2006) is unable to discern differences between one or another set of two colors. Print the graphic on a black and white printer – if any of your graphics don't look good in black and white, they may not be easy for someone colorblind to distinguish – or try running the images (or website – follow link on frame) through this free service from Vischeck.
Font size
A general rule of thumb, similar to any PowerPoint design for projection, is never to go under 18 point (pt) in your font size. This means that the vast majority of your poster should be well over 18pt, saving 18pt for items of detail your viewer is least likely to be interested in scrutinizing. Suggested ranges (“sans-serif” includes Arial and Helvetica, “serif” includes Times New Roman and Palatino):
Title: 60-80pt (possibly even larger if you don't have a long title), bold, usually sans-serif
Researchers: 40-60pt, bold, usually sans-serif
Affiliations: same as Researchers, but not bolded
Section headings: 35-50pt, usually sans-serif
Text: 24-40pt, usually serif
Figure legends: 20-30pt
Charts/Graphs: Titles similar to section headings, and axis labels and numbers similar to (or larger than) figure legends – because these may be imported from other programs and resized, compare these after placing charts into your poster, and resize fonts in Excel or other chart/graph software if necessary. Figures are often the first (and may be the only!) thing many of your viewers look at, so you want to make sure they know what they're looking at!
References, Acknowledgments, and Contact Information: 18-36, never larger than the regular text (except possibly for a website address), but this is where you can shrink to make space without frustrating your reader. A viewer who is interested enough in your poster to approach should still be able to read these without squinting.
Note, however, that fonts of the same stated point size can be very different in actual size/height. Serif fonts especially can be the equivalent of 10-20% smaller than the same point-sized sans-serif font, and specialty fonts can be ever more widely divergent. The exact same font even sometimes translates slightly differently between printers, so converting to a PDF before printing can be useful, unless the printer of your poster may need to make alterations in it. (If you are printing to the poster printer in our lab, pay careful attention to all of the guidelines below, especially if only sending a PDF!)
Layout
Usually, having the text and figures flowing down 3 (sometimes 4) columns is best, but occasionally you may change your format to work around graphics (or placing incidental information or a website address across the bottom of the poster). If the flow is atypical, arrows or other signals for how to follow the text should be employed. Also, you don't have to (and shouldn't!) fill all of the space of the poster with text or graphics. White space in your text will help make it more visually appealing and easier to read, which will make it more likely the viewer will at least glance at your poster before moving on to the next one.
Set your line spacing to exactly 1, to avoid spacing problems with superscripts and subscripts (Purrington, 2006). If the text seems too condensed with single-space, use 1.5 line spacing at most. Do NOT double-space! – the white space it provides is considered negative rather than positive white space. In some sections (such as Methods, Results, and Conclusions) you can even use bullet points instead of sentences and paragraphs. Use headings and subheadings, even arrows, as needed to help your viewer move through the poster.
A general rule of thumb to make sure your font sizes are readable is to print the poster onto an 8½" x 11" sheet of paper (create and print a PDF, or print a PPT slide as a handout). The text, although small, should be readable without magnification (with the possible exception of References, Acknowledgments, and Contact Information).
Final suggestions:
Proofread your poster carefully – although spelling errors may catch the attention of passersby to your poster, it's not the kind of attention you want. Pay special attention to the title – there is little more embarrassing than your typo in 100 point visible to thousands! Pay special attention to text in graphics (including titles and axis labels in charts and graphs), as they've never even been through a spell checker. (And remember that spell-checkers will not catch a lot of errors – the most prevalent being “form” and “from”! - Never rely on a spell-checker alone!) Typos, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors convey the impression that you were careless – and if you're careless in your writing, what message does that say about your research? Whenever possible, have someone else (or several others) read the poster over. (Remember that 8½" x 11" version of your poster you printed to check readability? - If it's not readable, they won't want to help you.) Try to get someone with a background both in English and in your field, or at least a related science, to read it.
Read your poster aloud, preferably to someone else in your field – but even to a lay person or to yourself is very helpful. If you stumble at any point, or if the phrasing sounds awkward, look at changing it. Also listen for flow – does it seem like your poster “jumps”? (If you are reading bullet points, if they are parallel in structure it still shouldn't sound jumpy.) Does it go back and forth between past and present voice? Is it filled with passive instead of active tense? (and did you include who's doing the action? If “assays were run on the excised tissue with a spectrometer,” you should consider rewriting the sentence!) Does it jump from first person (I/we/me/us) to third person (he/she/they/them) in the middle of sections?