How to Make a Great Poster

Making a great poster can be fun and is certainly a challenge!

A GREAT POSTER IS...

readable,

Readability is a measure of how easily the ideas flow from one item to the next. Text that has lots of grammatical problems, complex or passive sentence structure, and misspellings is "hard to read".

legible,

If a text is legible, it can be deciphered. For example, an old book may not be legible if the paper has corroded or the lettering has faded. A common error in poster presentations is use of fonts that are too small to be read from 6-10 feet away, a typical distance for reading a poster.

well organized, and

Spatial organization makes the difference between reaching 95% rather than just 5% of your audience: time spent hunting for the next idea or piece of data is time taken away from thinking about the science.

succinct.

Studies show that you have only 11 seconds to grab and retain your audience's attention so make the punchline prominant and brief. Most of your audience is going to absorb only the punchline. Those who are directly involved in related research will seek you out anyway and chat with you at length so you can afford to leave out all the details and tell those who are really interested the "nitty gritty" later.

Here are some ideas about how to get the most attention for your efforts.