How to give a great poster presentation

Preamble

Giving a poster presentation at a conference is a great opportunity to get your work out there! Here’s a workshop of helpful hints and tips to make up a great poster!

Some resources

There is lots of advice out there:

1. A great set of slides from an outreach librarian at the Bod (very comprehensive)
2. UCL’s design guide (advises UCL’ers to only use UCL colours but the webpage is beige)
3. University of Liverpool’s guide (I particularly like their notes on graphs, text and colours)
4. Brief guide from NYU

Making a plan

Audience

Before you start thinking too hard about what your poster will look like, consider your audience. Are they likely to:

• …be academics? Or should your poster be accessible to industry representatives, public servants, etc.?
  People who are not academics might have some surprising insights into your work - be prepared to translate your work to public health workers, policy-makers, or industry representatives

• …have clinical training? Have statistical training? Have some specialist knowledge relevant to the focus of the event your are presenting at?
  Remember, at every global health conference there is a poor lost modeller (me) who has no idea about the physical/clinical/ecological details of your research that are important to you!

Layout

Consider reading flow:

Imagine you are reading your poster, or ask someone with fresh eyes to read it: does the natural order your audience reads your poster in match your expectation? From the UCL resource:

Text

• Bite-size pieces of information are easier to digest than large chunks!
• Use bigger text than you think you should!
• Consider organising the text of your poster into bullets,
• highlighting words that you want to jump off the page,
• and removing 90% of all jargon!
  • For example, I know what the word zoonotic means in the context of malaria, but lots of people at a public health/applied maths/epidemiology conference may not! I’ll use “malaria that infects monkeys” instead! And, of course, a picture of the zoonotic malaria transmission cycle …

Pictures

There are lots of details that are important to a figure when we include it in a paper, that we should subtract when we use the same information in a slide deck or research poster. Supply the minimal detail to understand the idea/result that your figure is communicating. Make text big and concise and avoid technical language that we would need to read your paper to understand. Consider colourblind-friendly colour palettes (these resources might be helpful).

The University of Liverpool resource has a great example of how to format graphs for a poster:

Another example - here’s a figure I put in this paper:

… and here’s what the same information looked like when I presented the project as a poster:

(This poster was for an online conference!)

Interactive elements

During a poster presentation, you only have a short window to catch the attention of your audience. You also have an advantage over giving an oral presentation: your audience can get right up close with your presentation! Interactive elements to a poster presentation can really increase audience engagement, and they don’t need to be direct or obvious. My favourite poster presentations have involved chalk annotations over a mathematical model diagram, a spring attached to a poster to explain the forces involved between cells in a mathematical model of wound-healing, and a jar of sand to start a discussion about the dynamics of a landslide. I presented a Shiny app as a poster with fishing wire to animate buttons and sliders!

Miscellaneous tips

• Don’t forget to acknowledge co-authors/research groups/sponsors/grants involved in supporting your work (e.g., with a logo for a grant/sponsor)

• Include a QR code to your website/linkedIn/preprint - if your audience has bookmarked you, they’re more likely to remember your research at a later date!

• Once you have a draft, stand back! Imagine your draft at A0 size, across the other end of Radcliffe square - what things in your poster stand out from far away? Does it send a clear message when a reader can only see the title, pictures, and maybe some sub-headings?

Some examples

Now let’s have a look at some example posters from me + my friends :)

Let’s discuss:

• Who is the audience of each of these posters?
• What do we think the poster is about when we look at it from a distance?
• How much reading time do we need to get the gist of the poster?
• What do these posters do well?
• Where could these posters improve?

Aside: Better Poster

A different school of thought to the classic research poster is the better poster, which prioritises a single, headline result, and negative space for maximal impact. Love them or hate them, they do make us think a bit more critically about what we put on a poster!

Conclusion

Hopefully now you’re feeling confident and ready to whip up a great poster!

UniOxford has a print studio which I think is available to students and staff!

Download today’s workshop as a .pdf here