How To Design a Scientific Poster, Part 1
In this 4-part series, I’m going to be dishing out the design details on how to take scientific ideas and communicate them in a poster without committing egregious visual sins.
There are SO many posters at so many conferences around the world that suffer from confusing colors, lack of structure, too much text, spacing problems, oversharing. I could go on. And I will.
I’ll be walking through several redesigns of a scientific poster that my cohort friends made in 2019 and we redesigned together. We’ll look at the pros and cons of their initial drafts and then examine the changes that we made together to get to the final poster.
By the end of all 4 parts, you should have a grasp on what to consider when you’re first laying out your poster and how to troubleshoot some issues that may arise as you start to add your information. In part 4, I’ll give all my best tips and include a Google Slides with some basic templates.
Instructions I gave my cohort before we started the process:
Pick a color palette. Use the hex code (a 6-digit code that starts with a #) to ensure that the colors match and are consistent throughout. You can use a color picker extension with your browser (for those who use Google Chrome) and select colors from a favorite Pinterest image of a color palette. If you need some inspiration, head over here. You will use the colors to consistently and meaningfully signal related concepts throughout your poster.
Use the central space for your findings. We’ll get deeper into why your poster shouldn’t necessarily follow the flow of a paper, but for now it suffices to say that the middle part of your poster is what will catch most people’s eye first. Put the information you want folks to walk away with there.
Add a QR code. I’ve never seen a poster with too little text. But with the classic problem of too much text, you can get away with off-loading extra documents (e.g. a handout you used for the design that you want to show to poster-viewers) into a Google Folder attached to a QR code. The reason I say Google Folder is that once you’ve made a QR code with a free QR code generator, if you want to change what it links to, a drive folder is your best bet. You can use a cloud host of your choosing, but trust me when I say this solved so many potential headaches as people made edits.
Give your audience a visual representation of your data and/or findings to look at. It can be an image you have permission to use from your research footage or a cartoon-style strip where you reimagine the scene illustrated. It could be a large chart or flow. Whatever it is, it should more immediately communicate the idea of your poster to your audience than the text.
Laura’s First Draft Poster
Let’s start off with what’s great here:
Laura followed my instructions regarding choosing a color palette and putting her findings in the middle. She also has a QR code in the top right corner and has chosen to represent a scene of dramatic improvisation from the research study in stick-figure cartoon fashion for her viewers. Yay! All of these are good things.
Laura color-coded her text as it relates to the colors of the key concepts she flagged (“variation”, “(non)rational subjectivities”, and so on).
Laura’s references are in a small font, since only folks who really want to know the source will be reading that section, and she used endnote numbers to indicate that the text is citing a source.
Can you guess what we focused on changing?
Laura has too much text here. She said as much when she sent it. Most often, when I work with researchers and students who are developing a poster or presentation, the text stays in draft form in a Google Doc until about a week before the product or presentation is due. This helps us make any last minute changes without having to restructure the poster (she can update it live and I can see any changes and make those in Photoshop or InDesign accordingly). Laura wanted some help paring down what she had to know what I felt as a reader was the most important for getting her point across.
The images of the actors are inconsistent in style. Laura told me that this was actually intentional! We ended up keeping this in the final design as the movement from stick figure to outlined cartoon person was representative of the increasing complexity of character development throughout the scenes.
The research questions are currently in two places. We only need to see them when they’re about to be answered.
Paragraph forms of text are intimidating to readers who just walk up to your poster and want to know the gist of the research. Bullet pointing that can reduce the scary factor and invite more folks to read your poster.
Laura’s Edited Poster
You’ll probably notice that this poster immediately feels different. That’s because we created more white space and used blue-grey boxes to delineate that space. We rolled with these cute, simple speech bubbles for the headers because the resonated with the rest of the theme of the research: improvisation and speech.
We avoided outlines at all costs. They’re just boxes that want to be filled in.
We gave ample space between each of the elements. White space is your friend. Too much white space is overkill, but honestly I’d take that over crowded text any day.
We stuck to columns that are about newspaper width. Your brain thinks its reading much faster when it gets to move down lines quicker; hence a newspaper doesn’t print a story straight across the full width of the page, but breaks it up into little columns to make your brain happy!
We used the drop shadow effect and different opacities to add depth to the poster. Your brain remembers what it reads on paper better than it does in digital form. Whether you’re presenting digitally or physically, adding some depth and 3D-ness to your image will make it more legible and memorable.
We moved the research questions to be directly over the findings that corresponded. Duh!
We used the bottom margin of the poster’s white space to squeeze in the references. They didn’t need to be their own squared off section and putting them on the white space makes them feel more backgrounded.
We used all caps for headings to direct the eye. We switched the body text to a serif to add some contrast and complexity to the poster without making it any more crowded.
Clever readers will catch that in this draft, the arrow for “Multiverse/Pluriverse” still needs to be made green to match its box. You’ll also notice that the cartoons were not yet added into this version because Laura was playing around with a few of the figures in a separate storyboarding program before she sent them to me for the final version.
How would you rate the readability of this poster?
Personally, I’d say it went from about a 3 to at least a 7 or 8. Some of the text lines are a little bulky, but in a way that we were ok with when we went to print. You can’t win ‘em all, especially when the words you’re using are super long or you have to explain in-depth a gnarly theoretical concept.
xo,
em
