Designing conference posters

Gratuitous advice on how to prepare posters for scientific meetings, research conferences, and similar gatherings of nerds who want to share their stuff on really big pieces of paper.  With apologies, this page is really long, but should give you the basics on how to make your poster and how to present it without embarrassing yourself.  Feedback always appreciated via Contact button.  Happy posterizing!

Feel free to skip to any of the three main parts:

What sections to include
DOs and DON’Ts
Presenting your poster

Please also feel free to download and view/print the PDF of the image shown below: it shows a generalized (but tad boring!) layout and is packed with additional hints. Available as Powerpoint template, Apple Keynote template, too. The idea is that you read the advice text, then delete it. Or if you’re sick of advice, just jump to replacing my advice with your text.  Similarly, you delete all the arrows and fake illustrations I’ve added to the template.

(If you are a teacher and are asking your students to present a poster, I highly recommend printing out the PDF as a poster and hanging on the wall for students to “enjoy” a month before the poster is due. Poster quality will be higher if you do.)

A one-sentence overview of the poster concept

A large-format poster is a document that can communicate your research at a conference, and is composed of a short title, an introduction to your burning question, an overview of your novel approach, your amazing results, some insightful discussion of aforementioned results, a listing of previously published articles that are important to your research, and some brief acknowledgement of the tremendous assistance and financial support conned from others — if all text is kept to a minimum, a person could fully read your poster in under 10 minutes.

Why a poster is usually better than a talk

Although you could communicate all of the above via a 15-minute talk at the same meeting, presenting a poster allows you to more personally interact with the people who are interested in your topic, and lets you reach people who might not be in your esoteric but no doubt fascinating subfield. Posters are also handy because they can be viewed while you are off napping or at a bar, and even after the conference if you find some hallway real estate to pin it up on. Finally, presenting a poster is especially recommended if you suck at public speaking.

Motivational advice

The best general advice I can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstances in which a poster will eventually be viewed: a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters. Because poster sessions are often concurrent with the “wine and beer” mixer, chaos is further increased by hundreds of uninhibited graduate students staggering around hitting on each other. It’s not a pretty sight.  And it gets worse: meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as “Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion” and “Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable red pandas.” Or the presenters next to you will be really cute and funny, and their crowd will act like a gravity sink for people’s attention. In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers.

Choosing software

The best programs for designing large-format posters are page layout applications such as QuarkXPress, InDesign, LaTeX, and Scribus (Open Source!). These programs allow control of text wrapping around images, text flow among associated text blocks, and much more. But if you know what you’re doing you can also cobble together great posters using graphics packages such as Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Freehand, and Omnigraffle (my current favorite). Inkscape is also recommended by some, and is free, free, free. There is also, more recently, the arrival of software that specifically targets the scientific poster market: PosterGenius. But Microsoft Powerpoint is the software of choice for most people, but that’s only because people own it and know how to use it.  Opt for anything but Powerpoint if you can swing it.

Making a poster from scratch

Handcrafted posters are far superior to anything that you could make with a poster printer, but they are not advisable for the busy or artistically challenged. But if you are artsy and want your poster stand out, go crazy. And then send me a photograph so I can put it here. Bonus points if you are wearing all black and smoking.

Choosing a layout

If you’re new to the poster concept and would like to see some examples, have a quick look at the “Poster Sessions” group on Flickr, where users have contributed 100s of photographs of posters at meetings and conferences. The group has both great and absolutely terrible posters, but they are not labeled as “good” or “bad,” so don’t just start emulating one of them. You can also look at uploaded posters at F1000, a site by “Faculty of 1000,” but as before, some the posters featured are simply horrible.

If you’re lazy and have downloaded the Powerpoint or Keynote template at the top of this page, just replace my advice text and graphics with real content (if you have it). Page dimensions, column number, column width, and font size are all pre-formatted to produce a poster that is readable from 6′ away. I have also designed it to possess a good amount of white space (blank space), which is critical for a readable poster. Try to resist the urge to use this white space. To encourage responsible use, I added a Powerpoint macro that delivers a mild shock via your keyboard when you decrease white space below 35%. If you have a Pacemaker, please turn off automatic macro functions.

Unlike a manuscript, a poster can adopt a variety of layouts depending on the form of charts and photographs. Indeed, you don’t want your poster to look like every other poster in the room.  As long as you maintain sufficient white space, keep column alignments logical, and provide clear cues to your readers how they should “travel” through your poster elements, you can get creative. The image at right is one example of how to demote the unimportant sections to the undesirable real estate at the bottom portion of your poster, freeing up the right-hand column for your stunning Conclusions. This strategy might be especially valuable for portrait-style posters where the bottom part of the paper almost touches the floor. [I'm going to push the above format heavily as soon as I make a template for it. It's the way to go.]

Making sure your poster doesn’t suck

The trick to producing a great poster is to embrace the rough draft process, and that means having a version ready a month before your conference. Then bribe six people (friends, strangers, etc.) to look at it when you are not present. Ask them to leave their suggestions on small Post-Its that you provide for them (e.g., as on poster shown below). Ask them to comment on word count, prose style, idea flow, figure clarity, font size, spelling, etc. Note that you can print a miniature version of your poster on letter-sized paper to get a very rough sense of impending layout challenges, but such a shrunken version is extremely hard to critique and you will lose friends if you ask them to do so.

Another great way to solicit comments efficiently is to convert your poster to a jpg and upload it to Flickr.com, an image-hosting site that is popular with photographers. Once the image is on your Flickr site, you can ask people to visit the poster image and to add electronic Post-It notes (see example), or to make general comments. If you want to give this a try, join the  “Pimp My Poster” group on Flickr. Internet-based poster feedback is especially good if your commenters are far away, or if commenters don’t want to be seen with you. And if you have a poster draft that you’re deeply embarrassed about, you can set the image’s “privacy level” to “Just Friends” — which makes it invisible to everyone but people you invite.

What sections to include and what to put in them

Title: Should convey the “issue,” the approach, and the system (organism); needs to be catchy in order to “reel in” intoxicated passersby. [Maximum length: 1-2 lines.]Abstract: Do not include an abstract on a poster! If you are presenting your poster at a meeting, you will probably be asked to submit an abstract; this abstract is for inclusion in the “meeting catalog,” not for on your poster. If for some reason you are forced to include an Abstract section on your poster, please certainly abide by those rules, but consider asking the meeting organizer why on earth their society’s guidelines are so silly. At the very least, don’t make your abstract long: aim for 50 words or less.

Introduction: Get your viewer interested about the issue or question while using the absolute minimum of background information and definitions (such things put a reader to sleep, which is really dangerous if he or she is standing); quickly place your issue in the context of published, primary literature; then PITCH an interesting, novel hypothesis…THEN you can a general experimental approach that will TEST your hypothesis. Please note that “X has never been studied before” is a classic but classically lame reason for doing something. Unlike a manuscript, the introduction of a poster is a wonderful place to put a photograph or illustration that communicates some aspect of your research question. [Maximum length: approximately 200 words.]

Materials and methods: Briefly describe experimental equipment and methods, but not with the detail used for a manuscript; use figures and tables to illustrate experimental design if possible; use flow charts (the type with text and drawings within boxes) to summarize reaction steps or timing of experimental procedures; include photograph or labeled drawing of organism; mention statistical analyses that were used and how they allowed you to address hypothesis. [Maximum length: approximately 200 words.]

Results: First, mention whether experiment worked (e.g., “90% of the birds survived the brainectomy”); in same paragraph, briefly describe qualitative and descriptive results (e.g., “surviving birds appeared to be lethargic and had difficulty locating seeds”); in second paragraph, begin presentation of data analysis that more specifically addresses the hypothesis; refer to supporting charts or images; provide extremely engaging figure legends that could stand on their own (i.e., could convey some point to reader if viewer skipped all other sections, which they usually do); place tables with legends, too, but opt for figures whenever possible. This is always the largest section, except if you have no data. [Maximum length: approximately 200 words, not counting figure legends.]

The graphs make the poster, so make your graph appropriate to your data. And make it look pretty. Here are some general pointers (but see Dos and don’ts section, too):

Use line plots (below) to show means (=averages). Much better than bar graphs because you can easily see the variation around the mean; also removes the temptation to fill bars with different colors and patterns for no reason. Error bars can be standard errors, standard deviations, etc., so be sure to specify which in figure legend. Also specify the sample sizes for each treatment. Comparison of means can be done with unpaired Student’s t-test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), etc.

Use box plots (below) to displays medians (when one or more groups have non-normally distributed data). The “box” contains 50% of the data points, and the middle line of the box is the median. The tips of the projecting bars show minimum and maximum values. There are ways ways to make these, so it is critical to explain graph elements in the figure legend. List sample sizes, too. Comparisons of medians can be done with Wilcoxon rank sum tests, Wilcoxon signed rank tests, and Kruskal-Wallis tests, among many others.

Use scatterplots (below left) and regression plots (below right) to show relationships between continuous variables. Regression assumes causality (X causes variation in Y, e.g.).

Use bar graphs (below) to show count (=discrete, discontinuous) data. Statistically compare counts with goodness of fit tests and contingency chi-square tests, for example.

Conclusions: Remind (without sounding like you are reminding) the reader of the major result and quickly state whether your hypothesis was supported; discuss why your results are conclusive and interesting (attempt to convince reader of these points!); relevance of your findings to other published work; relevance to real organisms in the real world; future directions. [Maximum length: approximately 200 words.]

Literature cited: Follow format described by your main society exactly; web sites and rumors you heard at Starbucks are equally undesirable sources, so find a journal article that supports your needed fact or opinion. Also, if you haven’t read a journal article completely you should not cite it. [Maximum length: approximately 10 citations.]

Acknowledgments: Thank individuals for specific contributions to project (equipment donation, statistical advice, laboratory assistance, comments on earlier versions of the poster); mention who has provided funding; be sincere but do not lapse too much into informality in this section; do not list people’s titles. Also include in this section explicit disclosures for any conflicts of interest and conflicts of commitment (more info). [Maximum length: approximately 40 words.]

Further information: There will be people, hopefully, who want to know more about your research, and you can use this section to provide your e-mail address, your web site address, and perhaps a URL (or QR code; example) where they can download a PDF version of the poster (edit so that URL is not blued or underlined). [Maximum length: approximately 20 words.] [I sort of made up this section, but I really like it and it seems to be catching on.  But you don't need it.]

Dos and don’ts

• First of all, yes, I know that most people prefer to write, “Do’s and Don’ts.” Humor me.  I’m an apostrophe snob.  If you object, just find a different site to get your poster tips.
• The number one mistake is to make your poster too long. Densely packed, high word-count posters are basically manuscripts pasted onto a wall, and attract only those viewers who are for some reason excited by manuscripts pasted onto walls. Posters with 500-800 words or less are ideal. For those who feel that their experiment somehow warrants an exception to this brevity advice (i.e., “everyone”), find a friend to help you edit, asking them, “What text, figure, or table could I possibly delete or shorten?” To view your word count in Powerpoint on a Mac, go to the File menu and select Properties.
• Avoid titles with colons if you can. They are just too cliche, in my opinion.  Coloned titles are sometimes devised in order to inject humor into an otherwise mind-numbing poster topic. E.g., “Attack of the Crohn’s: contribution of chromosome 16 allelic variants to inflammatory bowel disease progression.” The other motivation for using colons is to provide greater detail about the general topic introduced by the first clause, which is purposefully vague so as to interest a wider viewership (e.g., “Causes of obesity: additive effects of inactivity and ad libitum feeding on yearly weight gain in Homo sapiens”). Although humor and clarity are great, it is better to achieve them without a grammatical crutch, especially if everyone else is using the same crutch. If you absolutely must have a coloned title, just be sure it doesn’t force you to spill onto a third line. And for the love of God, don’t craft two-coloned titles.  More on the topic, if you are interested.
• Format the title in “sentence case” (e.g., “Font abuse in inbred versus outbred populations of Homo sapiens”). “Title case” (e.g., “Font Abuse in Inbred Versus Outbred Populations of Homo Sapiens”) and “all caps” (e.g., “FONT ABUSE IN INBRED VERSUS OUTBRED POPULATIONS OF HOMO SAPIENS”) obscure useful naming conventions (e.g., people’s names, Latin binomials, genes, alleles) that depend on font formatting. It is true, of course, that most posters and journal titles used to be set in either “title case” or “all caps,” so people of a particular age (old people) will defend these styles “To The Death” or “TO THE DEATH.”
• Use a non-serif font (e.g., Helvetica) for title and headings and a serif font (e.g., Palatino) for body text (serif-style fonts are much easier to read at smaller font sizes).
• Do not “bullet” or otherwise punctuate section headers. The use of a larger font size for headers, coupled with a simple “bolded” format, is sufficient for demarcating sections.
• The width of text boxes should be approximately 40 characters (on average: 11 words per line). Lines that are shorter or longer are harder to read quickly (according to research!).
• Avoid blocks of text longer than 10 sentences.
• Whenever possible, use lists of sentences rather than blocks of text.
• Use italics instead of underlining. Underlining draws too much attention to the word.
• When using acronyms and numbers (e.g., ATP, 666) within the body of text, scale down the font size by a couple of points so that their sizes don’t overpower the lowercase text, which they would do if you left them at the default size. Use of “small caps” will sometimes do the trick, but this effect varies with different fonts and with different software.
• Set line spacing of all text to be exactly 1.  Doing this protects the aesthetics if you have used super- or subscripted text.
• Do not trust the “tab” feature to insert the correct amount of space when you are indenting a paragraph (the default is usually too big). Set the tab amount manually, with the ruler feature.
• When you have quotations, make sure your software hasn’t used the “double prime” glyph, instead. Double primes are the thingies used for inches (e.g., 5′ 11″), and mathematical formulae.
• Correct any errors in spacing wit hin and between    words, especially before and after    italicized    text. (See how annoying that is??!) Note that you can use a single space between sentences (the “double space” convention was needed for typewriters, and we are slow to lose the habit). Use the Search/Replace feature to globally “replace” all double spaces with single spaces, and to locate locations where too many spaces occur between words.
• Avoid using dark backgrounds. There are numerous reasons for this, but probably the most important is that dark backgrounds make designing graphics a royal pain. To make your graphics work on a dark background you would need to either invert the figures so that they stand out against a dark background or you would need to frame your figures in white boxes. Both of these are time intensive, and the latter chews up white space unnecessarily. It’s better to just use a white background. And you save on ink, too, so the media people won’t put a hex on you!

  

• Approximately 8% of males and 0.5% of females have some degree of color-vision deficiency (example). Because there are so many different kinds of deficiencies, it is sometimes hard to remember which colors and color combinations are “safe.” To test whether you’ve made a terrible mistake in this regard, you can load an image of your poster onto the internet (as a PDF or JPG) and run it through the free Vischeck service, or you can download their Photoshop plug in that does the same thing: in both cases you will see your poster as color-deficients see it. In general, avoid using red and green together, and opt to use symbols and patterns instead of colors for graph elements. If you want to delve into the details of a particular color, refer to the Internet Technical Groups’s interactive Java program or their color table. See the Rigden article, below, for an excellent overview of color deficiency conditions and how to design for them.
• Similarly, if you have a color sensitivity mutation and don’t know it, you might inadvertently design posters that are difficult for wild types to interpret. Or just plain ugly. If you’re curious, you can test your color perception online. White males of European descent are especially encouraged to test themselves–they are disproportionately color deficient (see Keegan and Bannister 2004, below, for a likely consequence). No inbreeding jokes, please.
• If you are using Powerpoint, print to a PDF first and then open the PDF in Photoshop to print. For some reason, when you print directly from Powerpoint the color rendering doesn’t work. Same goes for printing from normal PDF viewers (like Preview). If you don’t own Photoshop, bribe somebody who does. Geeks who own Photoshop like cookies, FWBs, etc. Use your imagination.
• Complete the entire poster on a single platform. Switching from PC to Mac or Mac to PC invites disaster, sometimes in the form of lost image files or garbled graph axes. Even if you are lucky enough to transfer content across platforms, switching in this way often creates printing problems in the future. Probably will make your kids look funny, too.

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  Graph titles are not appropriate for manuscripts, but they are great for posters. Having short, informative titles helps to lead the viewer more effortlessly through your poster.

• If you can add miniature illustrations to any of your graphs, do it. Visual additions help attract and inform viewers much more effectively than text alone. Tables benefit from this trick as well.
• Most graphing applications automatically give your graph an extremely annoying key that you should delete.  Just directly label the different graph elements with the text tool.
• Acronyms and other shorthands for genotypes, strains, and the like are great when talking to yourself but are terrible for communicating with others. On your graphs, use general, descriptive terms that would make sense to somebody who is not familiar with your research area. You can always add the strain ID in parenthesis: “Control genotype (Col-0).”
• Y-axis labels aligned horizontally are much, much easier to read, and should be used whenever space allows. Viewers with hypertrophied, inflexible neck musculature will be especially appreciative.
• All graphs should have axis labels formatted in “sentence case” (not in “Title Case” and not in “ALL CAPS”).
• Never give your graphs colored backgrounds, grid lines, or boxes. If your graphing program gives them to you automatically, get rid of them, and curse the programmers as you do it. If you personally know one of those programmers, break their fingers. Ideally, inactivate their gametes, too, just in case they’d pass on that code via their DNA, which I suspect they do.
• Never display two-dimensional data in 3-D. Three-dimensional graphs look adorable but tend to obscure true difference among bar heights. 3-D graphs belong in Time magazine and 1st grade. Again, if you know the bozo who makes 3-D bar graphs the default style in graphing software, break his/her fingers and prevent him/her from reproducing.
• Make sure that details on graphs and photographs can be comfortably viewed from 6 feet away. A common mistake is to assume that axes labels, figure legends, and numbers on axes are somehow exempt from font-size guidelines. On the contrary, most viewers will read only your figures!
• Powerpoint does not allow “wrapping” of text around inserted figures, so if you want this option for a particular section, you need to construct the paragraph or section as a separate Microsoft Word file (which does allow text to wrap), and then insert this Word file into your Powerpoint poster by the menu command, Insert:Object (select the “create from file” option). When you want to change anything, you merely double-click the section and the Microsoft Word file will be called up, magically, for you to edit.
• Use web graphics with caution. If you’re looking for a good generic photograph of something, I highly recommend searching through Flickr; then you just send an e-mail to the owner and ask whether you can use his/her wonderful photograph in your poster, with proper credit of course. You need something high resolution so that it doesn’t look pixelated (fuzzy) when printed.
• Never assume that your mentor has, or can find, a high-quality image to give you. If they have anything, it is usually a crappy image pulled off the Internet back in the early 1990s. So if you have access to a digital camera, use it to get a high quality photograph of your study setup or organism (e.g., your Drosophila mutant, a close-up of your Arabidopsis in flower). Memory space is cheap on a digital camera, so take 100 photographs to ensure that at least one has crisp detail, good composition, non-distracting background, etc. Sometimes to get the perfect shot you will need to seek out a microscope that has a camera attached to it. Run your best image through Photoshop to adjust contrast, image size, and sharpening. It should look professional when printed; if it does not, start over.

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  If you include a photograph, add a thin gray or black border to make it more visually appealing. Just remember not to overpower the image with an overly thick line. Choose a line color that is subtly pleasing but barely noticeable to the viewer.

• Don’t clutter the top of the poster with logos. Your institution or company’s name is already on the poster in the address field, so the logo adds absolutely nothing except tasteless branding. And because a logo is usually nicely designed, its presence undermines the visual impact of the images in the rest of the poster. But if you are required by your stupid boss or mentor to include all sorts of logos on your poster, corral them all into the Acknowledgement section.  Or just make the bottom 2″ of your poster a long line of logos.
• For exactly the same reasons, please do not include your family’s coat of arms, regardless of how prestigious a bloodline you think you come from.
• If you are gluing higher resolution (e.g., 1200 dpi) images or photographs onto your 300-dpi poster, choose matte finishes for illustrations whenever possible to minimize glare for viewers standing off to the side of your poster at crowded sessions).

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  If your topic is related to an audio subject, do not pass up the opportunity to include a button-activated sample of your featured sound on your poster. Record your sample sound and then affix the device (sample shown below) to an empty area in the appropriate section. Fill the picture frame with an illustration of the sound-generating organ or the beast itself, and indicate where on the photograph the viewer should press to activate the sound. Example. You can get these anywhere (e.g., Radio Shack or Tarjé) for about $10, or you can buy them on the Internet. If you don’t do research on amusing noises, but still want a gimmicky, well-visited poster, consider lodging one of these gizmos in your Introduction area (perhaps, “Press this button for a 10 second overview of my poster,” for when you are away from your poster). Or you can ask people to leave a message for the next viewer, which will generate a huge amount of interest in your poster even if your research is garbage. It would be very meta.

• If you wish to show your poster viewers a whole bunch of photographs, go out and buy one of those digital photo frames and cram it full of photographs. You can get a 4×6″ version for about $100, and smaller, keychain-sized ones for as cheap as $10. Check Google for options. Whatever you get, just think up some clever way to attach it to your poster, and give written instructions to viewers about how they should use it. E.g., “This photo frame contains 30 photographs of grass blades, taken every 24 hours; to watch grass grow, just press START.” Of course, if you get one of the expensive ones, you should also buy a motion alarm so that envious conference attendees don’t walk off with it. Another option is to save your photographs to your iPod, and then just let the photos advance automatically; just figure out how to attach the iPod to the poster, and remember to detach the thing when you walk away from your poster (can’t trust those science nerds when it comes to iPods).

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  If you have a critical movie or sound file but don’t want to leave your iPod attached to your poster, just slap on a QR code with a caption about what it will do. If viewers have smart phone and QR code-reader app, they will jump on it. Also good way to include additional photographs or to point viewers to web sites.

• Although a minority at most meetings, people with visual impairments would undoubtedly appreciate your research summarized in Braille. For a nice overview, check out Sarah Lewthwaite’s thoughts on the options.
• If your topic is related to olfaction, make sure that one of your figures is a scratch-n-sniff. If your topic is related to a vile odor, perhaps put the odor into a plastic bag next to an invitation to “open the bag, if you dare.” They (yes, “they”) also make odor bags for companies that do odor research. Sold under the title, “odor bags,” not surprisingly.
• If your topic is related to texture (e.g., thorns), make sure that you glue it onto your poster. SO much better than a photograph.

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  If you have three dimensional data or complex molecular structures (examples; more examples), there are software programs (here’s one listing) that can generate stereoscopic images that are viewable with cheap 3-D glasses. Here are directions on making your own stereoscopic setup for about $19.98 (before tax) using Legos and two novelty keychain cameras. If you want to be especially nice to all viewers, have the stereoscopic figure hidden under a hinged panel that displays the normal figure. Have a pouch near the figure so that viewers can help themselves to glasses even when you have abandoned your poster in search of more beer.

• If you have information that only some viewers might find interesting, use a “hidden panel” approach. Just print your interesting extras onto your poster, but cover the area with a hinged piece of poster board onto which you can glue something else. Zoos do this a lot (e.g., “Why is the giraffe’s neck so long? Lift this panel to read about the answer.”). Overuse of this would be annoying, but there are circumstances where it can really liven up an otherwise mind-numbing poster.
• Format your Literature cited contents according to the inflexible rules that your main society has set forth. They all have rules, and they all like them to be followed.  References that are only haphazardly formatted mark a poster, and you, as unprofessional. When asking somebody to proof your poster, specifically ask them to be super-critical of your citation style. Keep your font size the same as the size of the normal body text.
• Always write, “data are,” not “data is.” “Data” is a plural noun (“datum” is the singular). Really. Many people roll their eyes at this advice and say that “data is” is acceptable because that’s what people often say. Well, the data might support that statement, but the prevalence of bad grammar doesn’t make bad grammar less badder. Similarly, lots of people wear bell-bottoms, but that fact doesn’t magically make bell-bottoms attractive. So do your part by double-checking your usage before printing. And if you happen to work at a data analysis software company and are all-powerful, could you please perform a massive search-and-replace on your manuals right before printing?? There should be a law that prevents statistical software companies from selling software or manuals with the error.  JMP, that’s for you.
• If you don’t know the difference between “effect” and “affect,” then don’t use those words. The Oatmeal’s “10 words you need to stop misspelling” explains it nicely.
• Resist the strange trend to use “woman” as an adjective. For example, don’t write,  “woman scientist” when you could just say, “female scientist.” If you cannot resist the peer pressure, then at least be consistent and write, “man scientist,” too. Awful, eh?

Presenting your poster

• Look cute. Attractive people get more poster visits (and better jobs, and cuter spouses, etc.). Yes, I know that’s unfair. Believe me. You can’t go back in time and request a better assortment of alleles from your parents or, ideally, from other people’s parents, but you can get rid of that yellow tartar buildup on your teeth and can get some sleep the night before.

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  If you are obsessive compulsive and have a large wardrobe, try to choose your clothes to match your poster color. Research (see Keegan and Bannister 2003 in “Useful literature”) has shown that your poster will be avoided, a bit, when you clash. If you are color blind or fashion-impaired, please ask somebody to help you dress (a lame pick-up line, but give it a try if you’re desperate).

• Do not wear sunglasses indoors. People will assume that you are high on drugs or are an egotistical jerk. Or both. Of course, you might be one of those people who gets severe migraines from interior fluorescent lights, so you get a pass, of course. Or you might be a malevolent Terminator with a missing prosthetic eye that you want to hide; you get a pass, too.
• Wear a name tag, if possible, so that viewers know that the poster belongs to you. Also comes in handy if you drink too much and strangers need to help you find your hotel room.
• If you get really bored at a poster session, pretend that somebody else’s poster is yours. Make things up, etc. Timeless fun. Oh, the stories…
• Do not chew tobacco. But a nicotine patch is fine. Remember that too many nicotine patches can cause rashes and cardiac arrest.
• Do not chew gum. People who do not chew gum find the sight of gum chewing mesmerizing and repulsive. If you cannot help yourself, hang out with cows instead of people.
• Keep your hands out of your pockets, especially if you are a compulsive key or coin jangler. Fill your pockets with pushpins if you think you won’t be able to resist. Don’t do this, however, if you are a hemophiliac.  That would be bad.
• Do not wear Axe Body Spray. In fact, that’s sound advice even outside the context of a poster session. It’s an awful smell that simply advertises any number of inadequacies, if not all of them. If you happen to have one of those rare autosomal disorders that makes you smell a bit ripe even when you’re clean, by all means wear perfume. But just not Axe.
• Do not refer to notes when explaining your poster.
• Speak to your viewers as you explain your poster.
• A typical poster visitor really, really appreciates a 1-sentence overview of why your research is interesting and relevant. That’s 1 sentence, not 5 minutes. A good way to deliver this sentence is to point at a figure. For example, you might point to the illustration of the submerged hamster in your “Materials and methods” and say, “I was interested in whether hamsters can mate underwater, which would be adaptive if the ice caps continue to melt away.” Or, point to your favorite results graph and say, “I found that pairs of male and female hamsters didn’t mate underwater, but instead drowned within 25 seconds.” Keep it general, and make it clear to the visitor why you find the topic interesting. Get them hooked, instantly, on some unanswered question that they simply must hear more about.
• If a visitor hasn’t left or yawned, you might continue on to other figures. Point to specific parts of your poster whenever possible so that viewers are aware of your progression. Don’t point to text and read it.
• Avoid vagueness such as “this figure shows our main result.” Say something concrete, like, “We found that brainectomized rats finished the maze more slowly, as you can see from this graph that plots time…”
• Keep a black pen and correction fluid in your pocket in case a viewer discovers an embarrassing tybo.
• If more viewers arrive halfway into your spiel, finish the tour for the earlier arrivals first.
• When in doubt about how to act at your poster, imagine that a viewer will be considering your application for a job ten years into the future, or will be considering your graduate school application next week. This is pretty much how it all happens.
• Bring a small coin envelope of business cards to attach to your poster (via pushpins, or via a binder clip). Glue one of the cards to the outside of the envelope so that viewers know the contents, and write, “please take one,” or something equally inviting. (I am especially fond of business cards produced by MOO — they will print your contact information on one side and then a photograph on the backside.) Every card could feature a different photograph, so if your project is painfully photogenic, passersby can sort through the stack and take their favorite. They are more expensive than standard cards, but, hey, you’re worth it, right?)
• If you must leave your poster for a bit, attach a note alerting any viewers to your expected time of return or telling them where you can be found (e.g., which bar).
• Have on hand, but do not aggressively peddle, manuscripts and reprints of your work. If you have space on the mounting board, just pin them up for the taking.
• Also have on hand full-color, “shrunken” versions of your poster on 8.5 x 11″ (if you are in United States, that is) paper. If you have resisted the urge to shrink your font size, the shrunken text will still be legible (really!).
• If a person wants to take your photograph, or wants a photograph of your poster, be warned that he or she might post a very high-resolution version of your poster on an Internet site. If you have unpublished research, or research that might be deemed offensive to non-scientists, consider saying, “No, thanks,” to the paparazzi, or ask them not to post the photograph. Or tackle them and scream, “digital images steal my soul!!!” Froth at the mouth if you’re good at that.
• If your poster is really bad and nobody visits you, you might consider attaching a paper cup full of candy to the poster.  Put “help yourself!” on outside of cup. If you situate yourself a few posters away, you can then pounce on people as they help themselves. If they have taken your food offering, they will feel obliged to stay and talk to you. If you don’t have food, pin a dollar bill to the poster.
• Thank your viewers for visiting. If they have stayed more than 4 minutes, you have succeeded. If they say, “This is really interesting–I’ll definitely come back later,” you have failed.

Useful articles and books

• Block, S. 1996. The DOs and DON’Ts of poster presentation. Biophysical Journal 71:3527-3529. PDF
• Briscoe, M.H. 1996. Preparing Scientific Illustrations: A Guide to Better Posters, Presentations, and Publications, 2nd ed. Springer-Verlag, New York. [preview via Google Books]
• Day, R.A. 2006. How To Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 6th ed. Oryx Press, Phoenix. [Amazon]
• Keegan, D.A., and S.L. Bannister. 2003. Effect of colour coordination of attire with poster presentation on poster popularity. Canadian Medical Association Journal 169:1291-1292. link
• Matthews, J.R., J.M. Bowen, and R.W. Matthews. 1996. Successful Science Writing: A Step-by-Step Guide for the Biological and Medical Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [preview via Google Books]
• Pechenik, J.A. 2009. A Short Guide to Writing about Biology, 7th edition. Longman, New York. [Amazon]
• Rigden, C. 1999. ‘The eye of the beholder’—designing for colour-blind users. British Telecommunications Engineering 17:2-6. [PDF]
• Tufte, E.R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press, Connecticut. [Amazon]
• Wolcott, T.G. 1997. Mortal sins in poster presentations or, How to give the poster no one remembers. Newsletter of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Fall:10-11. [PDF]
• Woolsey, J. D. 1989. Combating poster fatigue: how to use visual grammar and analysis to effect better visual communications. Trends in Neurosciences 12:325-332.

Useful internet sites

• Poster Perfect (article at The Scientist, by Edyta Zielinska)
• Better Posters (great blog by Dr Zen Faulkes, a biologist at University of Texas-Pan American)
• Adventures in poster making (blog post by Robyn Hall)
• Poster presentation (Eastern Kentucky University)
• Designing Effective Posters (University of Kansas Medical Center)
• Poster Session Tips (Pennsylvania State University)
• Design of Scientific Posters (Pennsylvania State University)
• How To Make a Great Poster (American Society of Plant Biologists)
• Creating Effective Poster Presentations (North Carolina State University)
• Postersession.com’s blog (by company that prints posters)

When you’re ready to print


Print to a PDF file first, then examine the PDF file at full magnification to proof for color accuracy, pleasing font rendering, and crisp image detail. If the PDF looks awful, go back and fix your source file. Repeat process until you’re too frustrated to go on in life, then print (again, from the PDF). If you don’t own a poster printer, you can send your file to one of many online companies that print posters and then mail them to you (or to your meeting location). Search “scientific posters pdf shipping site:com” (or something like that) on Google to get the names of companies. In some instances the conference organizers have pre-arranged discounts with a printer service, so check with the people in charge before you choose a service.

Note to all-powerful meeting and conference organizers

In case you haven’t noticed, most posters these days are absolutely terrible, and this is largely your fault. You probably list allowed sizes, deadlines, and other such details, but you haven’t given your conference participants what they really need: some philosophical advice, some style advice, and some directive about word count. Threaten to punish word-count violators with pepper spray.  At the very least, don’t give the poster award to the poster that uses the smallest font (seriously, folks). If you are able to come up with useful guidelines and links, make sure that the advice web page is placed on the society’s permanent web page, not just on the temporary site associated with the year’s meeting information.

Using this site

Anyone is allowed to link to this page, but please don’t download the darn thing and keep it on your site (applies to templates, PDFs, too).  And please don’t copy/paste parts and then adapt them to your liking on your site, in PDFs, or slideshows, even if you cite this page.  But it’s totally fine to quote a sentence or two from the site as long as you use quotation marks (these things: ” “) and include citation or URL.   All text, images, templates copyright Colin Purrington (me) unless otherwise noted.

Purrington, C.B. Designing conference posters. Retrieved <today’s date>, 2011, from http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign.

[Note that you replace <today's date> with the today's date.]