By Beija Villalpando, WSU Vancouver Neuroscience student
You’ve spent countless hours running experiments and analyzing data, and now the time has come to advertise your hard work with a poster. You may be thinking, “how am I going to fit months of research onto my poster?”, but let me stop you there. Your poster should be a short story of your work with a big picture message tailored to your audience. The figures should be clear and concise with small blocks of supporting text. Finally, the poster needs to be aesthetically pleasing. While those guidelines seem straightforward, creating the “finished product” becomes difficult when attempting to transform a 42” x 44” black space into an interesting, effective, and concise tribute to your work. Now there’s a certain amount of style preference involved in designing posters; so I’ll focus on the major do’s and don’ts and leave the details to you.
A common poster layout includes your title, list of authors, introduction, methods, results, conclusion, future directions, references, and acknowledgements. Overall, your poster layout must be easy to follow, because you don’t want your audience questioning where they should begin reading. The picture located to your left is an example of a poster with good flow.
Additionally, be careful with your color scheme. Brightly colored posters may draw attention, but may distract from your content. For example, red text on a blue background appears blurry, so stick to neutral colors!
Now let’s break down the major remaining aspects of the poster:
Title: Less is best, so keep your title short and descriptive. Plus, a broad title with key words helps you attract a larger, more diverse audience.
Introduction: Always start with the “big picture” so you can hook your audience, and keep them intrigued by filtering your jargon. I recommend using bullet points for this section, because they provide text that is easy to follow.
Methods: Briefly describe your experimental equipment and procedures, but save the details for your formal paper. If possible, use diagrams and figures to illustrate this section.
Results: As with methods, opt to illustrate your results with figures and images, and avoid tables. Also, provide short, descriptive figure titles that convey the significance of each illustration.
Conclusion: Use this section to present the “take home message” and application of your work. Bullet points or a numbered list will help make key points with few words. You may tie your future directions in here or create a separate section.
Acknowledgements and References: Make sure to give credit to those that have helped make your research possible, whether that’s thanking your donors and/or citing prior studies.
When practicing your presentation, remember that your audience will be viewing several posters and may become overloaded with information. Be prepared to give a one-minute synopsis for those in a rush, as well as a more detailed talk for those that have more time and express interest. When the time comes to present, relax, be confident, and let your enthusiasm for your work show. This is your time to network, receive feedback, and advertise your exciting research!