Chief Scientist Notes: Striving for Excellence
Posters are not simply journal papers pasted onto boards, nor are they mounted sets of presentation slides. When effectively designed, they are something in between.
For a poster to communicate, it must first seduce a standing and mobile audience in contrast to a seated, captive audience. If you don't grab their attention in the first few seconds with an eye-catching, elegant, simple design, you will usually lose them. If they can't read it from five feet away, as they hover in momentary indecision whether to stay or go, you will usually lose them. If the poster lacks both readability and eye-catching design, no one, even those who stop briefly to be polite, will remember it. You have wasted your time and your audience's time.
There are more than 200 posters to see in a typical ARM meeting. To leave a good impression and favorably incline key people toward continuing your funding, you must resist the temptation to cram your poster with too much information. "Readable from Five Feet Away" is a minimum requirement. The 24-pt font sizes usually recommended are too small to meet this requirement; 36- or even 40-pt sizes are needed. And using large font sizes does wonders for reducing verbosity, another deadly poster mistake. After meeting minimum readability requirements, what then makes for an effective poster?
First, because the audience is passing by, an effective poster should quickly orient the audience to the work being presented. Usually, a poster accomplishes this goal with a prominent title and with simple, eye-catching supporting images. First impressions are everything. You catch or lose the audience in a matter of seconds.
Second, accommodate both types of viewers: scanners and detail junkies. For scanners, put your conclusions in a colored box or some other design element differing from the rest of the poster, perhaps with a key image; put it at eye level for easy visibility. For detail junkies, organize the poster left-to-right to promote traffic flow, so several people can view the details at the same time. Circular, centric, and other patterns, while seemingly creative, allow a single person to hog the poster and block others from viewing.
Given the distractions that occur while reading posters, a characteristic of an effective poster is that the individual sections can be quickly read (i.e., the poster should not contain large blocks of text nor long sentences).
More information on poster design can be found at http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/csp.html.
