This is how I design my academic posters

When I was younger, I’d often accompany my mom to pottery markets. My mom’s pottery is amazing, useful, and aesthetically pleasing - just look for yourself! Still, being at a market sometimes also meant long periods of waiting, and hoping some customers would approach our stand. That’s the experience that comes to my mind every time I’m at a poster session at a conference.

I believe that designing academic posters is similar to academic writing. You may start with some basic template, stick to the script, and prepare something presentable, something that “fits in”. But, over time, you start to find your own approach and unique style, the goal now being to stand out, rather than to fit in. For me, I feel like I’m learning or trying something new every time I’m designing a new poster, something that is very evident in the timeline of my own previous posters.

The key quality of a good academic poster is that it gives its audience a reason to stop and look at it. Like I said, poster sessions are truly awful experiences. Although there’s a ton of people around with seemingly nothing really to do, only few people actually bother to look at you or your poster. Designing a poster that can draw people in, and that will give you opportunities to talk about your work, can make this experience less stressful for you. A poster really only should be a conversation starter, a networking tool. The actual knowledge dissemination happens in talks with your audience.

In the past, I have used little tokens that thematically fit my research to pass out to people walking by. For my poster on sleep, screen time and executive functions, for example, I handed out tea bags, with a QR code and link to my study. At a conference last year I asked people to write on my poster. Good graphics or plots, however, can also draw people in and, what’s more, they give you a chance to talk about them.

My Process

Structure

The way I like to design academic posters, is to start with some kind of structure. In the past, that meant sketching out boxes on a piece of paper, arranging and re-arranging them. For my two most recent papers, however, I simply googled academic posters and looked for structures and designs I liked. Here’s a recent examples for a poster I designed for our SCOOT Study. You can clearly tell how the structure inspired the final design.

Font

Next, I like to look for a color scheme and font. I’m really proud of the fonts I have amassed on my computer. From And This Happend to Ice Cream Grande to Zoika Font. For a poster, what I’m looking for is a clean, sans-serif font, which has multiple weight levels in between Regular and Bold. This gives me a lot of flexibility in designing and highlighting text. I generally like Avenir Next, but I have been using D-Din for my most recent posters.

Colour Palette

Selecting a colour scheme is equally important and also a fun process. Some research projects already have a set colour palette (e.g., the ECHO project). For others, we can get more creative. I like pastell colours, however, for posters I tend to go for bold, strong colours with clear contrasts. I like this website, which lets you explore colour palettes and generate your own.

Designing

I tend to use Affinity Photo (Vers. 1.10.8) for any of my photo editing and designing processes. Canva, of course, is also a great program, particularly as the full version, however, it’s nice to have a little more control over the editing process, which Canva cannot really give you. PowerPoint is also easy to use, however, it does not give you any actual editing capabilities, so the end product is, most of the time, just basic.

It’s important to set the correct file size right at the start to avoid having to resize anything later on. Most conferences I have ever been to always require A0, which is 841x1189mm (or 33.11x46.81 in). That’s about the only thing that’s fixed at the beginning of the design. Everything else, in my process at least, is purely trial and error. For my most recent design, for example, I spent two hours making a chart, only to realise later on that it was completely unnecessary.

Having the overall structure in mind, I sketch out specific sections on paper. At this point, I don’t have any text written yet. Instead, I simply use scribbly lines to first plot out the entire poster. Usually, about halfway through the designing process, I realise that there’s not enough space on the poster, so I always end up cutting a lot. As you can see, not all of my sketches make it onto the final poster, but they clearly influence my designing process.

Text

The one comment you can trust you’ll always get when it comes to designing posters is that there’s too much text. It is an impossible task to put your full 12,000 word journal article into one simple A0 poster - so you shouldn’t even try. A poster really only is a conversation starter - the actual knowledge dissemination happens in conversation between you and your audience. Text that may take away attention from your conversation, therefore, is only a distraction.

I like to think of the text on my poster as speaking notes for me when engaging with my audience. They are the main points I want to hit when talking about this piece of research. Therefore, I only try to use bullet points and keep my arguments as broad as possible. Yes, sometimes larger chunks of text are unavoidable, specifically for qualitative research. Still, try to keep it functional and minimal.

Visuals and Plots

What’s more important than the text, are the visuals on your poster. Just like the text, they are not supposed to stand on their own, but instead, allow you to use them in conversation with your audience to drive your main arguments home. Basically, they are supposed to give you something to point to. I use R in all my analysis and are, therefore, also creating all of my plots using ggplot2 or base R commands. When putting my plots on my poster, however, I tend to re-adjust or re-create them inside my editing program to give me a bit more control of axes labels and positioning. In my recent poster, for instance, I completely changed up the forest plot from our recent meta-analysis by replacing study names with numbers, changing the colour scheme to fit my poster, rotating it vertically, and making the bars slightly larger.

I’m definitely not of the opinion that everything on your poster needs to be functional. I always used little graphics, or visually pleasing effects as a way to make my posters a bit more attractive. 3D effects, or little shadows, for example, are great. Also, slightly rotating text and putting a box around it, makes it stand out and important. A clip-art person pointing towards a piece of text can also be a nifty trick. If anything, a poster should be fun - fun for you to design and talk about, and fun for your audience to look at.

Useful tools and resources

• Coolors: As noted, I like working off colour palettes and Coolors is a great website to get some inspiration from. I tend to use the “Explore Palettes” function, rather than to generate my own. I find it’s also an interesting look into my mental state at the time to see which palette I’m most drawn to at the time.
• Noun Project: I use icons and graphics from the Noun Project in most of my presentations and posters. The way I usually work is that I first look for a designer that I like, and then sticking to their designs within one poster or presentation to ensure all icons and graphics are in the same style.
• QR Code & TinyURL: QR codes are like newsletter subscriptions. They are very easy to get, but terribly difficult to keep track of. There’s nothing worse than realising that the printed QR code on your poster has expired. I like to use TinyUrl, which is a nifty website to shorten URLs and create QR codes. As long as you keep your account, your links and codes also remain active
• GoogleDocs: I always link the QR code on my poster to a GoogleDoc, where I can compile a list of resources, references, as well as link my e-mail address. What’s more, I can change this GoogleDoc anytime, without having to change the QR code. This is quite handy and just one more way to personalise an academic poster.

That’s all.

What’s your process of designing posters? Where do you start, what are your main challenges, what tools do you use? Also, if you have a poster that you are really proud of, please share it with me. I’m hoping to put together a library of fun posters for future inspiration and learning.

Is this useful to you? What else should be added? Let me know!