Poster is a great way to showcase your research at conferences. Today we’ll talk about the main elements in a poster.
Across the top of the poster should be your title, author names, and affiliations. You can also add logos of your institutes or departments. Use a large, bold font for the title, so that other people can see it when they walk by, which is about 2-3 meters away.
Then you have the main body of your poster, and the layout is typically in multiple columns. Depends on how wide the poster is, and how wide the figures and tables you are going to include, you might have 2 to 4 columns. Experiment with different layouts to see what works best.
The main body of the poster would generally include Introduction, Methods, Results, and Conclusion. Don’t copy your whole conference abstract to the Introduction. Like a research paper, the introduction should give a background of what is known, what is not known, and what you intended to do in this study. Do this in as fewer words as possible. Use the Methods section to tell the readers your experimental setting, perhaps the timeline of a procedure. Use a diagram or flowchart to show how various experiments in your study come together as a whole. In the Results section, present your results in tables and figures. Give enough details in the legends so that tables and figures are self-explanatory, and also use arrows or symbols to point out in the images the most interesting results you want a reader to see. After the results, briefly summarize the main conclusion. Use bullet points if you have multiple conclusions. The main body of the poster should be easy to read from about 1 meter away.
Include funding information at the end, and a few references if necessary, but use a small font for these so they don’t take up too much space.
A few key points to keep in mind:
- Use graphs instead of words
- Make the wording concise
- Make everything big