Over the last few weeks of the semester, I needed to make two posters. In preparation, I attended a poster workshop that made me think more intentionally about how to make an effective poster. I’ve outlined some of my key takeaways below that I hope can offer guidance to anyone preparing a poster of their own.
1. Know your audience
Beyond having a visually strong poster, one of the most important things is how you present it. Different people will come up to your poster with varying degrees of familiarity with your topic. Experts that know the field well may want to get straight to the results, while others may need more context to understand the significance of the work. Thus, in thinking about your poster presentation, rather than one fixed script, it’s important that you are flexible. It can help to ask someone who they are, what they are interested in, and what brought them to your poster. By knowing your audience, it can help you decide how much background information to give, how technical to be, and how long to spend on each section.
2. Practice multiple versions of your talk
In the first tip, I mentioned the importance of being flexible. More concretely, it means that you should have more than one way to talk through your poster. A five-minute version is useful for someone who wants the full story. A two-minute version works well for someone who is interested but moving quickly. A one-minute version helps you communicate the core of the project clearly and efficiently. A thirty-second elevator pitch can quickly tell someone what your project is, why it matters, and why they should keep listening. Practicing these different lengths makes it much easier to adjust naturally depending on the setting and the person in front of you.
3. Think of your presentation as storytelling
One of the most useful takeaways from the workshop was that a poster presentation should not feel like reading off sections of a paper. It should feel like telling a story. First, explain why the topic matters. In other words, answer the “so what?” question. Then explain what is missing, unresolved, or not yet understood: the knowledge gap. After that, show how your study addresses that gap: what you did, what you found, and what you think it means. One useful way to structure this is as an hourglass. You begin broadly by introducing the big picture and why the topic matters. Then you narrow into your specific study, methods, and findings. Finally, you widen back out to explain the larger significance of the results. This structure makes your work easier to follow and helps your audience leave with a clear sense of the main takeaway.
4. Start with a template
Making a poster from scratch can be surprisingly frustrating. Resizing text boxes, moving figures around, adjusting alignment, and trying to make everything fit neatly takes much longer than you expect. Starting with a template saves time and energy. It gives you a structure to work from so you can spend more of your effort refining the content rather than fighting with formatting.
5. Spend time on the title
The title may be the most important part of the entire poster because it is often what determines whether someone stops to look in the first place. A good title should be clear, interesting, and easy to understand. It should give people a reason to care about the project without overwhelming them with too much detail or jargon. One of the best ways to test a title is to ask other people for feedback. Ask your friends, people in your lab, classmates, or mentors: Is this title interesting? What would you think this project is about? Would this make you want to stop? That kind of feedback can help you find a title that is both accurate and engaging.
Making a poster well is not just about fitting your research onto a large page. It is about learning how to communicate your work clearly, visually, and conversationally. As I made my own posters over the past few weeks, these are the key tips I looked back on.
— Shannon Yeow, Engineering Correspondent
