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The Art of the Scientific Poster


So, you’ve done all the fieldwork, all the statistical analysis and your final manuscript has been completed… What’s left is your scientific communication that goes beyond your journal article: The scientific poster.

Scientists are notorious for creating poor posters. Whether its overwhelming paragraphs of text or incomprehensible graphics, scientists usually find a way to make a poster as unappealing as possible. This is in direct contrast to the actual purpose of a poster, to advertise the scientists’ research. A common mistake in poster creation is that scientists try and summarise the information of their journal article into a poster format. The poster is a completely different medium and the viewer expects to digest it in a completely different way. Whereas the journal article is information-orientated, the poster is a visual beast, with its primary objective to grab the eye of a potential viewer, who can then dig into the information once interest has set in.

As far as visual attraction goes, pictures are essential. Pictures not only stand out across the visual landscape, pictures also perform a wonderful job of putting scientific research into perspective, or even conveying information without words. Pictures can also bring about an emotional response in a viewer. Working on wetland pollutants? A picture of a degraded river immediately tells the viewer what the problem is, and why your research is important. Using the same principles, graphs can also become excellent additions to your poster, but only if they are simple. The output of your research, the results, can be displayed virtually word free in the form of a graph, but overcomplicated graphs will only confuse viewers. Graphs with too many axes, variables and too complicated keys should rather be left out. Graphs that stand out, are intuitive and can be understood readily are ideal.

In most cases, your poster will be displayed at conferences together with hundreds of others. The viewers your poster will be presented to will have spent hours looking at hundreds of other posters, making their cognitive skills a little less than sharp. This means that substantial blocks of text will seem highly unappealing. Less is more. The relative weight of each word on a poster far exceeds those in a journal article. Make your point and make it unambiguously. As you need to capture the visual attention of your viewer, the spacing of your text/images are something that needs to be carefully considered. Try and understand where an audience will first let their eyes fall and take advantage of these places. Make sure the title of your poster is placed centrally, preferably near the top. The wording of your title also needs to succinctly describe what your poster is about. Other visual cues such as arrows or lines may also assist the viewer in understanding the flow and narrative of your poster.

The poster is purely a visual medium, differing from the journal article. Its of paramount importance to understand that even if both works aspire to relay the same message, it needs to do so in different ways.

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