How to design a poster

Many of the tips and the overall philosophy on this blog are relevant to designing a poster.

The first thing is to consider the audience for your poster. Do you expect someone to read the poster while you're not there, or do you want to use the poster to support your oral presentation? To me the answer is obvious and it is the latter. Most poster observers are walking around, they don't want to stand there for 20 minutes reading alone, and they want to be guided through the substance quickly. Moreover, you can always have a handout with more detail

Like a slide presentation, don't use a poster to replace your journal article.

Below is an example of a 36" x 48" poster that supports my activities on this website (it might be too small to read as reproduced here, but you get the idea). I've limited myself to 9 fairly simple visuals and provided enough simple text to help me talk a listener through the content and even to help a viewer if I'm not there. Just like preparing a presentation, you need to think through the key summary points and not overwhelm the audience with detail. Exclude all graphics that you don't plan to talk about. Be sure you can talk through the poster in 5 minutes, 10 at the outside. Remember, the idea is to get people interested in your work, not to give a comprehensive review. Show the most important results on easy to understand graphics.

My presentation first walks the listener down the left most (blue) column, summarizing the problem statement, the overarching question, and the overarching solution. The top gray horizontal bar provides more detail about the challenges, while the tan box provides two examples of converting bad slides into good ones.

I can get through this in about 5-10 minutes. If the listener is interested, I will direct them to more detailed information.

Keep your poster simple and clean. An alternative to the above format is to have the poster center on a single overall "systems" diagram of your research (see October 15, 2015 "tip"). A single central figure can be a great device for a poster if you can use it to talk through the essence of your research.

The visual motivation slide

On last week's tip I suggested that the first slide in a presentation could be the "set up" slide that establishes the overarching question. It is often useful to proceed the "set up" slide with a "visual motivation" slide. This is a simple and dramatic slide that dramatizes a problem and gets the audience ready for the "set up" slide. Below is a "visual motivation" slide I used a few years back when giving a presentation to a group of U.S. Army generals. The topic was the impact of Endangered Species Act restrictions on Army training lands. The graphic shows the training restricted zones at Fort Bragg, North Carolina caused by the need to protect endangered plants (green) and the red cockaded woodpecker (red).

This slide immediately let the audience know there was a big problem and got them interested in the overarching question which was presented on the next "set up" slide. That question was, "Can the Army responsibly manage endangered species with fewer restrictions?"

Develop a "set up" slide

Audiences need to know right up front why they are going to sit and listen to you. Define the overarching question of the talk very early. You will have a chance to redefine the question in more detail as the talk proceeds, but get it out in a simple way early in the talk.

One technique I use is the "set up" slide. This may be the first slide in a presentation that established the problem and sets up a tension that will be resolved in the talk.

One example is shown below. Herceptin is an effective therapeutic for breast tumors that overexpress the Her2 protein. However most Her2 positive tumors are quite heterogeneous, with the criteria for using Herceptin being as low as 10% of the cells over-expressing the protein. Core A and B below are from the same tumor but illustrate that different parts of the tumor have radically different Her2 expression profiles. This leads to a bit of a paradox as to why Herceptin is effective in these tumors.

This can be the first slide in a presentation. It sets up the overarching question. People know why they are sitting there and what they will learn. The speaker will have a chance later in the talk to define the issue more precisely.