Guidelines for Constructing and Presenting Conference Posters
A crash course in how to organize and present an academic poster.
Introduction
This document contains tips for making posters. I’ve found them helpful and would like to share them with you. If you read no further than this, simply remember to show don’t tell. It will be easier for you and your audience if you rely on pictures rather than text, and figures rather than verbal explanations.
General formatting
Choose a simple font. I prefer non-serifed fonts, because they are usually clearer from a distance.
Never use any font smaller than 28 pt. If you find yourself running out of room for text with such large font, then you may be typing too much.
From a distance, the title and authors should be legible. Scale them as you see fit, but they should be big. 100-150 point is typical.
I highly recommend using a vector graphics program, such as Adobe Illustrator or Coreldraw. The advantage of these programs is that one can scale text and figures however they wish without losing resolution. I find this particularly useful for the following development loop:
Collect data in Matlab
Export figures as .eps (encapsulated postscript, a vector image format)
Paste figures into the poster, and then scale, recolor, and change line weight as appropriate
Layout
Heading
Centered at the top should be the title, then the authors, then their affiliations and contact info. Each one of these can be smaller than the last.
Put logos for your affiliations in the upper left corner. At a WVU event, you can omit WVU, but normally you would include it. Then, include the Neuro-Mechanical Intelligence Laboratory logo.
Put your funding agency logos in the upper right corner.
The Meat
Columns are a common way to organize the flow of a poster. People frequently use three or four columns, with the abstract and background in the left column, and conclusions, future work, works cited, and acknowledgements in the right column.
If you have big diagrams that do not fit into columns, you can make the center of the poster more free-form.
Headers should split up different content types. A list of possibilities is:
Abstract (as submitted to the conference)
Background (prior work and/or motivation)
Methods (hardware systems, software systems, techniques used, analyses used, etc.)
Results (clear, high-resolution graphics that are nice to look at)
Conclusions (bullet points)
Future Work (bullet points)
References (works cited)
Acknowledgements (funding sources and helpful people)
These headings are basically what you would find in a research paper. Depending on your specific project, you may omit some or add others.
People have all sorts of rules for the proper ratio between text and images/figures. I think one should always seek to minimize the amount of text. A technique that I like to use is to think about your poster as a paper. Write out the story of the poster, with maybe 10-20 paragraphs. Then, put the topic sentence of each paragraph on the poster, and then replace the rest of the paragraph with a figure that conveys that information. This way, when you are presenting your poster to someone at the conference, you can just speak that story, and refer to the figures as you talk.
Don’t print the poster until you have presented it out loud, to yourself or a friend, and are happy with the flow. Following a poster with illogical flow is like reading a book whose pages are out of order. The technique in the previous bullet point may help with this. But even then, I have put together posters that I thought made sense, only to find myself stumbling while presenting it because the story wasn’t as logical as I’d originally thought.
If you find yourself describing anything with words while practicing your poster, add a figure to the poster that conveys that point! It will be easier for you to explain and easier for the listener to follow.
Presenting the poster
Presenting a poster is an art form of its own. Ultimately, you will be summarizing the paper for the listener. Therefore, some things about presenting a poster are a lot like writing a paper:
The listener needs some context for your work. They need to have some idea what question you are trying to answer, what other people have done, and why you took the approach you did.
You should give the listener some idea of the direction you’re going before you jump into the details.
However, there are some key differences:
A paper’s information is rigid, but a poster presentation is not. You can (and must) adjust the story depending on the size of the audience, the expertise of the audience, and the interest of the audience.
A listener will likely not absorb all of the information you are giving them. This is in contrast to a paper, which a person can read over and over until they understand it at whatever depth they prefer. It is always best to start broad and conceptual, and only dig into details if the listener shows interest.
Think of your poster as an advertisement for your paper.
Supplemental items, such as a tablet, laptop, or robot are always helpful! Every conference will ask you if you need a power outlet or a table when you register. If you have simulation videos, bring them and play them for people! If you have a robot that works, bring that along! If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand pictures, and a robot is worth a thousand videos. That’s a billion words!
Takeaway
The goal of publishing or presenting your results is to show someone else how to do what you did and share your conclusions based on your results. Presenting your work as a poster is a great way to engage in a conversation about your work and the work of others. Poster sessions are a great way to receive feedback on your work and connect it to others’ work. Learning how to present your work concisely and clearly is a critical skill for all engineers and scientists.