Resource of the Week #68: “How to Prepare and Present a Poster”

Hello again. Our current Resource of the Week is an openly accessible video on preparing and giving poster presentations.

This video contains much good material, including information on principles of design, tips for presenting posters at conferences, and examples of posters.

One especially helpful part shows a poorly designed graph, identifies problems regarding it, and then shows an improved version of the graph.

Accompanying the video is a PDF file containing draft and revised versions of 3 posters. Seeing the revisions is instructive. However, the file is large (about 30 MB) and so can be slow to download.

Here are some suggestions from this video. (I chose ones that aren’t in the current AuthorAID presentations on the topic.)

• Write the poster title in 90- to 120-point type.
• Use informative headings—for example, “Cells Display Exponential Growth” rather than “Results”.
• To suit attendees with different levels of interest, prepare a 30-second talk, a 90-second talk, and a 3- to 5-minute talk about your poster.
• When presenting a poster at a conference, look mainly at the people you’re talking to (not mainly at the poster).
• Point at relevant parts of the poster when mentioning them.

Until the next post—

Barbara