Guidelines for Student Posters

Poster presentations are a common part of every conference I've ever been to, and are usually the starting point for research careers. Undergraduates get a great opportunity to practice poster preparation in Leicester's fourth-year course, so here are some hints and tips - these are all personal, and you can feel free to depart from them!

• Keep things simple: think of the poster as a prop, allowing you to share your hard work and findings to an audience during a conversation, so include the display items necessary to get your key points across. You want to make life as easy as possible for your reader, the simplest possible route to understanding, so don't bury your findings in lots of unnecessary text and wildly over-complicated graphics.
• Give your reader a path through the poster: You can do this by having sections numbered to make it clear where to go next, and by using a multi-column format to keep blocks of text/graphics compartmentalised.
• **Use the (sub)titles to convey information: ** Rather than just saying things like 'Background' and 'Discussion,' use these headings to tell the reader what to expect from the box or sub-section, e.g. "Using Juno to study ice..."
• No need for full sentences: OK, maybe in the abstract where you need to clearly communicate "why" you're doing this work. But elsewhere, feel free to use bullet points, and think about your reader - if there are lots of bullets/text in the box, what's the take-home message, the clearest statement you're trying to make? Highlight that with boldface, italics, or maybe even colour.
• Include references: But references do take up a lot of space if you include all the bibliographic details. People tend to use DOIs (digital object identifiers) to provide handy links to papers without needing to write out every single detail.
• Make is easy for the reader: So use clear fonts that don't blend into busy/complex background, and make sure the size is big enough that people can read with ease.
• Maximise use of graphics: The biggest headache commonly seen on posters is a nice-looking but complex diagram, then a huge caption that I need to read before I can appreciate what the graphic is showing me. If possible, maybe add text (coloured boxes with arrows) to point to certain features of your graphic so you can highlight key points without the caption... think about how you'd point at the diagram as you were describing it in conversation. You want to make the purpose of the graphic immediately clear to the viewer, without them having to dig down for too much information... maybe even emphasise a key point (e.g., 'this parameter correlates with that parameter') in words right on top of the chart.
• Make it eye-catching: Black and white posters don't always capture the eye, and posters with tonnes of text are more daunting than inviting! Colour and background graphics can help here, but there's a danger in going over the top: you don't want to dilute the impact of the content by hiding it with busy backgrounds. Transparencies over graphics can help, so that they can be seen at a distance but don't get in the way of display.
• Plan your presentation: A reader will often come up to you and just say "tell me what this is all about." They don't want a half-hour lecture, but they do want a succinct summary of the work and its conclusions. Front-load the discussion with your key message: "we've explored this dataset and made this discovery..." and then add detail, rather than taking forever to get to the punchline.

Bottom line, with both the poster and your discussion of the material, is to make it as clear and accessible as you possibly can. Make it easy for your audience to get to the heart of your work, it'll generate discussion and make for some interesting future collaborations!