A scientific poster presentation is often the first type of scientific presentation that early career researchers will give. Before you write a journal article or a senior thesis even, usually you will have an opportunity to present a poster to during a poster session at a conference. It might be a local meeting, or a national one, or even an international meeting. Not ony that, poster sessions are something that you will be participating in for a long time. They will happen all through graduate school and during your post-doc time. Even when you are a professor or an industry scientist, if you go to a conference, there is a good chance that you will present a poster.

Unfortunately, a lot of the posters I see at conferences are really not very good in terms of presentation, no matter how impressive the scientific results may be. When the presentation is not optimized, it makes the other people at the poster session not want to stop and talk to you about your research. That defeats the whole purpose of presenting at a poster session, which is for people to stop and talk to you learn about your research. The only way it can have impact is if they learn about it, so that then they can cite it and promote it to their colleagues. Having a visually attractive poster is really a big part of getting people to stop and view it.

Tip number one: before you start to make your poster read the instructions for the poster session. Each meeting or conference may be held in different rooms they have different sizes and shapes of rooms. And the rooms have to accommodate the boards to put the posters on. So, each meeting may ask for a different size poster. Sometimes they’re wide and not very tall, and sometimes they’re tall and not very wide, and the overall sizes can vary greatly. You need to know what size the final poster is going to be before you start making it! Before you open PowerPoint and start dropping in your figures and text, figure out what size it needs to be and immediately resize the slide to match.

I have been to a few poster sessions where people did not read the instructions. I have seen posters that overlap the posters next to them. You don’t want to be that person who made their poster too wide and you have to cover up your neighbor’s poster to fully unroll yours! They are not going to like that. I have also seen posters that were built in the wide orientation for a tall poster board, and they had to hang their poster sideways, all because they didn’t read the instructions and they made it the wrong size. Imagine getting people to stop and read your poster when they have to turn their head sideways to read it!

Tip number two: make sure your poster is not visually overwhelming and scaring people away. To avoid overwhelm, make sure you leave at least 25% white space, which is the unfilled space between paragraphs or between figures. Although 25% might sound like a lot of white space, it is not that much if you keep in mind that a poster is a very visual medium. It is not meant to be read like a journal article, so you want to make sure it’s very visually appealing. If you don’t leave enough white space, what happens is the poster is visually overwhelming and people don’t want to commit to looking at it. They don’t want to be stuck talking to you for 45 minutes at a poster session. They want to spend about five minutes per poster so that they can see as many posters as they want to during that session.

Tip number three: limit the amount of text you put on the poster. To reiterate, because it is so important, posters are a visual medium, not a written medium. Keep your text short! You can’t just go into your manuscript and pull out a paragraph put it onto your poster. Well, you can, but it will look terrible and nobody will want to view it. People don’t like to see giant blocks of text on a poster; that doesn’t make them want to stop and talk to you. If you must start with text from your manuscript, cut it down by 50-75 %. It is perfectly fine to use bullet points that are even sentence fragments on a poster. The main thing to keep in mind is that you want the reader or the viewer to be able to get through the poster very quickly. If they can get through it very quickly, they are more likely to stay and ask you questions and dive deeper. Don’t try to put your entire manuscript on a poster!

Tip number four: make a very logical layout for your poster. Although you do want to include a lot of the same elements that you will in your manuscript, such as background, knowledge gaps or problem, research question or purpose, you won’t have full Materials and Methods, Results, or Discussion sections. These sections will be minimized. As you present the figures and tables, add just one or two sentences of discussion. A logical layout also includes using columns carefully. Using columns is a good idea because it is hard to read all the way across a poster, and then follow the next line all the way across the poster. Be sure to measure the columns so they are even. If you have three columns they should all be the exact same size, or maybe the center column is wider and the two outer columns are smaller but the same width. People read from top to bottom, then they come back up and go top to bottom again. Don’t lay out your poster to that the order zigzags around the space.  I have actually seen a poster in a poster session where the order of the figures was down, then up, then right, and then down to the left! It just didn’t make any sense at all it was nearly impossible to follow the flow of the poster.

Tip number five: think about visual readability. One aspect to consider is size. Viewers of your poster should be able to stand back and still be able to read it. They should be able to stand six feet (2 meters) away and still be able to read the text. When you have a really popular poster, you’re going to have a crowd of people standing around you, and the people in the back still want to be able to see what you’re pointing at as you are delivering your poster presentation. The font size needs to be large enough that the viewers can see it from that distance. Also think about the font itself. Do you want to use a sans serif font or a serif font? The sans serif fonts (they don’t have the little extensions at the bottom of the letters) are easier to read. Just like leaving white space, using a big enough and readable font will be helpful to your reader. Also think about your color schemes and choose colors that have pleasing qualities together and have enough contrast to distinguish the text from the background. People that are colorblind can’t see certain colors, red and green primarily, so how is it going to look to them? Another aspect for readability is the background of your poster. You might want to use a photograph or a map or something like that as the background, which is a clever and creative idea. But many times the patterns in the background interfere with seeing the text, figures, and tables.

Do you have any additional poster tips? Leave them in the comments below!