5.1  Giving Poster Presentations

Poster presentations may not seem as prestigious as oral presentations, but they are a great opportunity to interact with other scientists in your field in a reasonably structured way. Just like oral presentations, they force you to crystallize your thoughts about your research and, in this way, focus on its essence. After the conference, you can usually hang your poster in the hallway of your laboratory. Thus, you promote your work to passersby and have a support at hand if you must unexpectedly present your research to visitors.

Being accepted for a poster session at a conference means you must first create the poster itself, then prepare to interact with visitors during the session. At some conferences, you may also have a chance to promote your poster through an extremely brief oral presentation.

Typically, the scientists who attend a poster session are wandering through a room full of posters, full of people, and full of noise. Unless they have decided in advance which posters or presenters to seek out, they will stop at whatever catches their eyes or ears, listening in on explanations given to other people and perhaps asking an occasional question of their own. They may not be able to see each poster clearly — for example, they may be viewing it from a meter's distance, from a sharp angle of incidence, or over someone else's shoulder. In such situations, they will not want to read much text on the poster — not any more than attendees at a presentation will want to read much text on a slide.

Accordingly, you should design your poster more like a set of slides than like a paper, using all the recommendations given for slides earlier in this series (see Creating Presentation Slides). Strive to get your messages across in a stand-alone way: State each message as a short sentence, then illustrate it as visually as possible. In fact, one simple way to prepare a poster is to create a set of slides, print them full-size on A4 or US-letter-size paper, and pin the sheets next to one another like a comic strip.

If you are designing your poster as one large sheet rather than a juxtaposition of small ones, you have more freedom in the way you organize your poster. Use this freedom to reveal the overall structure of your content; doing so is easier with a single sheet than with a sequence of slides. In particular, organize related pieces of content in coherent visual units. Resist the temptation to place information "wherever it fits" in a desperate attempt to include as many details as possible. Instead of crowding your poster, be selective in what you include so you have the spatial freedom to organize your material into a logical structure that is recognizable at a glance. Also, as on slides, question the usefulness of anything you plan to use, especially frames, arrows, and colors.

Scientists often feel obliged to include a large amount of factual information on their posters: their affiliation (with postal address, e-mail address, telephone number, etc.), bibliographical references, funding sources, and the like. Although visitors may well want to take all or part of this information home, few of them actually want to read it on a poster, let alone write it on a notepad while standing in front of a poster. Such information is therefore best placed in a one-page handout that is available at the poster's location — perhaps with a reduced version of the poster on the other side. If these details are included on the poster itself, they should be out of the way, such as in the top-right corner or at the very bottom, so they do not interrupt the logical flow of content on the poster.