Some feedback from my first poster presentation.

Recently I got a chance to present my research as a poster. It was fun to think about and make the poster, from which I have learned (what I think are) some basic guidelines. Thanks to Jean-luc Doumont, specialists from a technical communication team, and my friends who criticized my poster.

Baseline to Start With

What summarizes the essentials of a poster, I think, is Doumont’s Three laws of communication, originally from here,

1. Adapt to audience - They will not adapt to you
2. Maximize signal/noise ratio: remove distracting elements on poster
3. Maintain effective redundancy: Using both verbal and nonverbal explanations to make the poster self-explained.

My understanding is that, a poster is considered successful if the audience can learn the complete set of information that the poster is intended to convey. Therefore, the poster should be carefully tailored and not as stuffed/technical/detailed as possible, since the audience may not be able to digest. Also, a certain level of noise and redundancy is necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the information transmission. Note that the three laws of communication are apparently applicable to not only posters but also papers and presentations.

The central idea in structuring the poster is that a poster is multi-scale. On the top level are the titles and captions, which are the most visible and eye-catching. The lower levels are the texts and figures, which might be read if the audience got interested. On each level, the information should be stated and developed into messages using short full sentences. These messages answer the questions of the audience at different levels of details: What is presented and so what? What is the gap between what people have and want? And where does the authors come in and what are their contributions? In my opinion, the idea of multi-scale presentation is similar to the inverted pyramid structure in journalism. The only difference is the ordering of visibility. A news article is more linear: the most visible part is at the beginning and the visibility decreases towards the end.

Format for Navigation

The multi-scale nature of the poster determines its layout. Two aspects should be considered: How it looks like as a whole, and how are the items relatively positioned? The basic rules are summarized as: (1) Proximity for relation; (2) Similarity for similar contents; (3) Prominence for importance. Particularly, the items, e.g. text boxes and figures, should be placed with alignment to grid lines to achieve a global level of “harmony”.

For text boxes, make sure to use a fixed set of fontsizes. Furthermore, be cautious of using boldface: Whatever words in bold should make sense on its own. This is another example of how a poster is multi-scale. Next, some people (Like Doumont) suggest no justifications for the text, while I used justification in my poster. I think this is scenario dependent. Finally, it might be beneficial to maximize the contrast, e.g. using color background with white boxes.

Figures and Visuals

The basic principle is that the visuals should be informative, instead of merely decorative. They should be designed with high proportion of data to ink while remain self-explained via necessary and meaningful captions, legends, narratives, etc.

For figures in particular, I do recommend Doumont’s suggestions:

1. No need to use grids: Grids are for figures in the past era of printed materials.
2. Only label the significant numbers: Instead of using the conventional uniform axis ticks, which is a waste of ink and does no provide much information.
3. For posters, no need to include figure numbers: Waste of space and ink.

Other Tips

Think twice if the reference and acknowledgements should be put on the poster. They take some space but do not add much information to the poster. It might make more sense to carry the extra information via some external media. Doumont suggested something like a business card that can be distributed. People who are interested can look into the details themselves later. This time I tried to do things digitally and put a QR code on the poster that links to a temporary post on my website.

If PowerPoint is used for making the poster and producing the final PDF file, make sure the slides are exported, instead of printed, as PDF files. The figure resolution would be lost in printed PDF files. Also, whenever possible, use SVG format, instead of PNG format, for the figures. This reduces the file size of the slides while maintaining high resolution. However, note that in the exported PDF file, some features in the SVG figure might be rasterized.