One challenge that is seen in conference poster sessions is the best design for their work, or research or company profile. This is seen by both industry partners and academics- professors, researchers and students. As part of the research activities, PGRs and Faculty staff may be requested to submit a research poster to be displayed on the poster day and entered into the poster competition. It is a great opportunity to present your work and talk about it with other researchers in an informal atmosphere.
So, issues that are raised include:
1. How should I design it?
2. What is the poster orientation -portrait or landscape?
3. What print material should be considered for the poster- gloss or not?
4. What is the poster size to use- AO or not?
5. What colour should the background theme be on?
6. What is the tool to use- MS Powerpoint or if a template or an online template or poster creator?
7. How do you format your poster? Do you justify them to one side or centralise them?
8. What colour is the font and what font sizes should be used in the title and body of each sub-section?
Hence, I profer the following notes:
1. POSTER is only one slide not 6-7 slides, if you are using MS Pointpoint.
2. Show more information with bullet points and more images. Use less wordy or crowdy content.
3. If you think that the space is too small to contain all the information, I will suggest that you remove some of them. The less words you have but clearly, brighter and more legible work is best.
4. Simply use one of MS Powerpoint template (I can send one to you)... from any of the ppt I also published on my profile as Conference posters.
5. If you use a template, you can easily edit and place ur things into it... It should have good space management to modify or customise as you want.
6. It has best if it has been proofread, you may make some spelling mistakes or misplace some contents. Please, always proofread your work.
Have you ever seen a really great presenter and wondered how they do what they do? Giving a great presentation is largely about practice, but there are many things that you can learn to do that will improve your stage presence and the way that you connect with a conference audience. You may attend conference sessions and training that will focus on your needs and explore tricks, tips and techniques of great presenters – and at times the context will be research presentations.
Although the themes of such sessions will come from your needs, requests and questions, by the end of the training you should be able to: prepare a good conference poster, deliver a message the audience will respond to, and guide an audience through dense and difficult material. You should also build a rapport with an audience, handle questions with confidence, show a confident stage presence, project your voice more effectively and deal with nervousness and use audio visuals effectively and so avoid PowerPointlessness.
If you want to use Conference Poster Templates, you can prep everyone for your conference with a poster that showcases your theme with fun and finesse using out-of-the-box templates you can customize for free. Here are some links for free Conference Poster Templates:
1. DesignCap https://www.designcap.com/poster/conference.html
2. Canva https://www.canva.com/posters/templates/conference/
3. Postermywall https://www.postermywall.com/index.php/s/conference-poster/all
4. MindtheGraph https://mindthegraph.com/app/poster-maker
5. MakeSigns https://www.makesigns.com/SciPosters_Templates.aspx
6. Craft of Scienctific Posters https://www.craftofscientificposters.com/
7. PiktoChart https://piktochart.com/templates/posters/conference/
8. PosterPresentations https://www.posterpresentations.com/free-poster-templates.html
9. ColinPurrington Poster Design Templates https://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design/
According to ColinPurrington, here are some DOs and DON’Ts (see https://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design/), below are some tips to avoid producing a terrible poster.
The number one mistake is to make a poster too wordy. Aim for 1000 words or less. That might mean 700 words in paragraph form (body text), plus 300 words in the legends of all your figures and tables. Below is an example poster that has almost 2000 words, 1000 too many.
The second-most common mistake is related to the first: a failure to maintain a pleasing amount of white space around text boxes and figures. A cramped poster is hard to read, and the brain simply cannot effectively process the information provided, regardless of how amazing it is.
Avoid titles with colons if you can: they are overused. If you absolutely must have a coloned title, just be sure it doesn’t force you to spill onto a third line.
Format the title in sentence case (#1, below) so that capitalization and italicization are preserved in trade names, Latin binomials, gene names, allele names, etc. For example, title case (#2 below) and all caps (#3 below) obscure such information. Effect of ken and barbie knockouts on sexual preference in Drosophila melanogaster
Effect of Ken and Barbie Knockouts on Sexual Preference in Drosophila Melanogaster
EFFECT OF KEN AND BARBIE KNOCKOUTS ON SEXUAL PREFERENCE IN DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER.
Use a non-serif font (e.g., Helvetica) for title and headings and a serif font (e.g., Palatino) for body text. Serif-style fonts are much easier to read at smaller font sizes (that’s why novels are rarely set with Helvetica and the like).
Do not add bullets to section headings. The use of a bolded, larger font is sufficient for demarcating sections.
The width of text boxes should be approximately 45-65 characters. Lines that are shorter or longer are harder to read quickly.
Don’t vary the width of text boxes (it’s visually distracting).
Whenever possible, use lists of sentences rather than blocks of text.
Use italics instead of underlining. Underlining draws too much attention to a word.
When using acronyms and numbers (e.g., ATP, 42) within the body of text, scale down the font size by a couple of points so that their sizes don’t overpower the lowercase text. Use of “small caps” will sometimes do the trick, but this effect varies with different fonts and with different software.
Set line spacing manually to make sure spacing is uniform. Doing this is critical if you have used super- or sub-scripted text. If you don’t, only some lines will have extra space, and that would be visually distracting.
Do not trust the tab button to insert the correct amount of space when you are indenting a paragraph (the default is usually too big). Set the tab amount manually, with the ruler feature. And never, ever use spaces to create a tab-like space (it just doesn’t work).
When you have quotations, make sure your software hasn’t used the “double prime” glyph instead of quotation marks. Double primes are the thingies used for inches (e.g., 5′ 11″), and mathematical formulas/formulae.
Correct any errors in spacing wit hin and between words, especially before and after italicized text. (See how annoying that is?!)
Use only a single space between sentences. The double-space convention was needed for typewriters so insisting on two spaces marks you as old person. Use the Search/Replace feature to globally replace all double spaces with single spaces (and to locate locations where too many spaces occur between words).
Avoid dark backgrounds for text boxes. Dark text on white is the easiest for most people to read. Also, dark backgrounds make designing graphics much harder. It’s better to just use a white background. And you save on ink, too.
Avoid color combinations that create problems for those with color-deficient alleles. Approximately 8% of males and 0.5% of females have some degree of color-vision deficiency (example). To test whether you’ve made a terrible mistake in color choice, you can run a JPG of your poster through Coblis, or use the built-in simulator in Photoshop. In general, avoid using red and green together, and opt to use symbols and line patterns (e.g., dashed vs solid) instead of colors for graph elements.
Similarly, if you have a color sensitivity mutation and don’t know it, you might choose colors that are inadvertently confusing or clashing. Get yourself tested, especially if you’re a white male.
Complete the entire poster on a single platform. Switching from PC to Mac or Mac to PC invites disaster, sometimes in the form of lost image files or garbled graph axes. Even if you are lucky enough to transfer content across platforms, switching in this way often creates printing problems in the future.
Give your graphs titles or informative phrases. You wouldn’t do this in a manuscript for a journal, but for posters you want to guide the visitor as much as possible.
If you can add miniature illustrations to any of your graphs, do it. Visual additions help attract and inform viewers much more effectively than text alone. Tables benefit from this trick as well.
Choose the right graph. Please see “Watch your figures” for help choosing among bar graph, line graph, etc.
Most graphing applications automatically give your graph an extremely annoying key that you should immediately delete. Just directly label the different graph elements with the text tool.
Acronyms and other shorthands for genotypes, strains, and the like are terrible for communicating with people outside of your laboratory. Use general, descriptive terms, even if they require more space, which they do.
Y-axis labels aligned horizontally are much, much easier to read, and should be used whenever space allows.
Format axis labels in sentence case (Not in Title Case and NOT IN ALL CAPS). People process sentence-case text faster.
Never give your graphs colored backgrounds, grid lines, or boxes. If your graphing program gives them to you automatically, get rid of them. (If you are friends with any of the programmers who make software that has such settings as defaults, please plead with them to revisit that decision.)
Never display two-dimensional data in 3-D. Three-dimensional graphs look adorable but obscure true difference among bar heights.
Make sure that details on graphs and photographs can be comfortably viewed from 6 feet away. A common mistake is to assume that axes labels, figure legends, and numbers on axes are somehow exempt from font-size guidelines. The truth is that the majority of viewers want to read only your figures.
If you include photographs, add a thin gray or black border to make them stand out against background color.
Provide the source of any image that is not yours. And only uses images that are in the public domain. When in doubt, ask the author/photographer/illustrator for permission. Or buy it. Please see, “Adding photo credits to talk slides.”
Use web graphics with caution. You need something with high-enough resolution so that it doesn’t look pixelated (fuzzy) when printed. FYI, photographs imported from TIFFs often look better than JPEGs because the latter are often compressed too much (or too many times). Gruesome details if you’re interested.
If you can’t find the perfect illustration or photograph for your poster, get one made. A good image can be used in multiple posters, future talks, and even in manuscripts. There are lots of illustrators and photographers out there, and they are starving. Give them a call.
Don’t clutter the top of your poster with logos. If you are required by your mentor to include logos on your poster, put them on the bottom of the poster and make them small. Here is an example image of a poster with logos at the top if you’d like see why it’s a graphical fail.
Format your Literature cited contents carefully. Even small mistakes will mark you as incapable of grasping the importance of details. When asking somebody to proof your poster, specifically ask them to be critical of your citation format. Ask several people, too: no one person is going to catch all your errors. Keep the font size the same as the size in other sections.
Write “data are,” not “data is.” “Data” is a plural noun while “datum” is the singular. Although it’s true that almost all non-scientists say “data is” when speaking, you should protect yourself from the scorn of grammar prudes at conferences. There are a lot of Type A people in science.
If you don’t know the difference between “effect” and “affect,” it’s probably best to avoid those words. The Oatmeal’s “10 words you need to stop misspelling” explains the difference nicely.
If you use “woman” as an attributive noun (e.g., “woman participant”), be consistent and use “man” in the same way (e.g., “man participant”). If either sounds awkward, revert to using adjectives (female, male), which work really well. Here’s the same advice from a woman in case you have discounted my opinion because I’m male.
Don’t plagiarize. Make it your own poster. Make the necessary corrections, as seen...
