Abstract
We need to talk about conference posters.
Many of us have consumed, judged, and forgotten thousands or more posters than those we can ever remember. Because most conference posters are terrible. Great work—great people—but far from great posters.
At your next conference, if you’re inclined to work hard or feel like giving your physical and mental faculties a real workout, visit the posters. Get ready for your eyes, brain, and deduction skills to go into overdrive scrutinizing large swathes of poster-based information. As you do so, remember that talented people have spent their precious time producing the physical objects you now behold. Remember that the poster you see has been cared for and worried about on its journey via plane, train, or automobile. Remember, above all, great posters are, pretty much, as rare as great presentations. Your expectations may be justifiably low, but it doesn’t have to be like this.
Posters as Academic Scholarship
The lamentable state of the academic conference poster is concerning precisely because they are common, legitimate, and important. Posters are an integral part of almost all academic conferences. Whether moderated or stand-alone, the incorporation of poster sessions into most meetings esteems the place of posters as a form of scholarly communication (Macintosh-Murray, 2007). Posters are an opportunity to share and showcase your work and yourself—and create conversations and connections with new collaborators (Miller, 2007). Further, posters are also an established currency of career progression. With high abstract rejection rates, “poster presentations” are firmly part of your resume and, if at prestigious meetings, are testament to the high quality of your work as judged by your peers. In some conferences, posters are the only chance, beyond being an invited speaker, to gain a place for your work on the program.
Yet, despite the opportunities these posters can catalyze, their widespread acceptance, and rising importance of posters in academia, their quality remains mostly disappointing in terms of design, clarity, and communication (Beamish, Ansell, Foster, Foster, & Egan, 2015; Persky, 2016). So why are most—even the vast majority—of conference posters quite so bad?
The Roots of Terrible
We think there are understandable reasons why posters aren’t living up to their potential. Firstly, the key rationale of the poster is often lost: to communicate. More pointedly, as the schools of persuasion and rhetoric remind us (Clark & Sousa, 2018; Leith, 2012), posters often fail to convey what’s most important in an engaging way that connects with the intended audience. As with most forms of presentation, judging the content of your poster requires you to dance a number of delicate dances: enough information but not too much, key information with enough context, breadth balanced with depth, and the right mix of images and text. All difficult decisions. Most of us feel like we are making it up as we go.
Yet the vast majority of posters show little evidence that these issues have been carefully considered. Firstly, instead of being seen as a distinctive presentational genre, posters are confused with being shortened manuscripts writ large. Literally. This results in posters that contain far too much content, content flow that’s hard to discern, text that’s too small to read at more than a meter, and insufficient images. Key information gets lost all too easily.
More crucially, most posters severely test the fundamental premise of most presentational genres—never make the audience have to work too hard either mentally or physically (Clark & Sousa, 2018). This is particularly vital because unlike a keynote address, your audience is engaging with your poster alongside many others. Attention and enthusiasm are at a premium and can easily wander to another poster in the moment. Fail to grasp your beholders in the first few seconds or make them work too hard to understand your key messages for too long—and the attention devoted to your poster becomes dependent on their special interest in your topic. Moreover, with so many other posters on offer, you will see eyes glaze and people quickly move on. How then to better ensure your poster is effective?
Insights to Make Your Poster Better
To fully realize the potential of both the poster genre and the opportunity that presenting posters provide, we recommend:
1. Don’t Copy Most Other Posters
Most academic posters are ineffective. This trend makes it harder for good posters to be created. Genre theory recognizes that new representations of a genre both reflect and constitute the existing genre (Frow, 2006). Like all manifestations of a genre, such as this academic editorial manuscript in IJQM a poster expresses facets that make it fit into the genre of the academic conference poster (Table 1). Genre means when we see a poster at a conference, we don’t need someone to explain or orientate us to it (Frow, 2006). We primordially understand what this object is, how we should behave toward or around the poster, and what to reasonably expect from the poster and/or its presenter (Frow, 2006; Swales, 2005). That we don’t immediately write on the poster (like a survey) or avoid reading the words (like a picture book) results from this primordial understanding of the poster as an academic genre.
The Genre of the Academic Conference Poster.
Genre is helpful for both those who produce and also consume academic posters (Frow, 2006). To develop proficiency in producing academic conference posters, and to effectively represent the academic poster genre, new researchers are likely to already have knowledge of this genre through their own previous experiences of conference posters (Swales, 2005). Helpfully, faced with the prospect of producing an academic poster for the first time, new researchers both consciously and unconsciously base this poster on their understanding of the genre of the academic conference poster.
Yet genre makes it hard for good posters to even be made due to the sheer dominance of poor posters because each bad poster both reflects and also constitutes the future genre of the conference poster. How do new researchers know what conference posters should look like? How do they implicitly assimilate the genre of the conference poster? They mirror what they see around them as being conventional in the genre. When most academic posters are ineffective posters, poor practices are perpetuated—not challenged. Thus, bad posters begat bad posters. Consequently, paradoxically, the first step to creating a good academic poster is to not take your lead from existing academic posters.
2. Nail Your Key Messages
Faced with the need to produce an academic conference poster, most of us readily move rapidly into our favorite computer design or presentation software package and start hammering that task out! Yet the art and science of persuasion tell us, that in order to be effective, we have to hold back from rushing in. Firstly, think clearly about what success looks like relative to your poster. Then, consider and specify your poster’s main intended messages.
But we can’t really even begin to think about success or the framing and content of messages without also considering who we are engaging with (your “audience”), what their concerns are, and what background knowledge can be assumed, or not (Frow, 2006). If you are presenting at an international conference with an international audience, this is ever more important. These are all integral parts of genre (Frow, 2006).
Ideally, your success indicators and these messages should be developed iteratively for your sense of your audience. Which messages are those which are most useful for the audience at your particular conference? What is the right number of messages? Having too many messages is counterproductive because main messages then get lost. Less is more. Having messages that don’t flow makes the messages hard to follow and remember. Some messages (and some framings of these messages) may be more apt, exciting, or interesting for some audiences, but not others. Most people will remember one or two things from tens of posters: Make sure they remember something from your poster by developing a small number of highly useful key messages.
3. Hone Your Messages and Context for the Audience
With a sense of what your key messages are—frame these messages in the best possible ways for your audience. Fusing knowledge of both your audience and your main messages, consider how best to communicate these messages to that audience. Information is only part of communication—as rhetoric reminds—content has to be engaging to audiences to be memorable. If you don’t engage your audience, chances are you won’t communicate successfully.
Decisions also have to be made about what other content to provide: How much context, methods, and discussion? Be wary of including too much or not enough other content. As genre theory indicates, this requires contemplating and preempting the nature and needs of the specific audience at the conference. For example, if your grounded theory qualitative research poster is for a major qualitative conference, your poster does not need to detail what qualitative research or what grounded theory is. Instead, only include as much content as you could reasonably assume your audience to need. Veer toward less if possible.
A useful means to provide extra information, for example, around your literature or design, is to have an additional one-page summary or copy of a related published paper available alongside your poster. This means that this information is available should an interested or very thorough person seek such—but that it does not cloud the poster for everybody else.
4. Conceptualize Your Poster Design
Reflecting on your success indicators, your audience, and main messages, how can you create a poster design that helps rather than hinders conveying the content? Before you move to actually practically create the poster, conceptualize the design first. Using the appropriate landscape or portrait format, what overall design do you want for your poster?
Most academic poster presenters adopt for format of that “academic paper writ large”. Positively, this design harnesses the thematic structure associated with academic “manuscripts” (i.e., introduction, methods, findings, discussion). Conversely, this also risks containing too much information and, ultimately, fails to recognize that posters, in genre terms, simply are not academic manuscripts written on bigger single pieces of paper. To treat them likewise is to impoverish the distinctiveness and potentiality of the academic poster genre.
To provide a better structure, posters can follow a set template specially designed to communicate findings from an academic poster clearly. For example, a recent article lamenting the weak communication of most scientific posters contained an evidence-based template that any scientific poster can use (Greenfieldboyce, 2019; https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/11/729314248/to-save-the-science-poster-researchers-want-to-kill-it-and-start-over?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social).
Other thematic structures are possible and can help others comprehend—for example, a poster presented using the structure and appearance of a flowchart or text message conversation. Such designs have a mix of questions about the research and short, clear answers in response to these questions. The poster could immediately be understood without explanation in terms of flow—and the information itself was brief, clear, and relevant. This poster exploited our knowledge of other genres (notably the formal features and structure of implication of the text message) as an aid to communication: Most of us readily understand how the information in a text message looks and flows. As with a text message, the information presented was notably brief and concise. It was very engaging—being both surprising and interesting. While some of us may balk at the novelty of this device, even if you decide your poster should fit with the conventional “academic paper format,” think how to work within this design better—use more images, less text, and infographic techniques to promote ease of flow.
Consider how white space can be used to draw attention to your most important points or messages. When a poster is completely full of text, images, and color, often importance can be lost. A poster that is more full doesn’t make you look more smart.
Also consider the flow on the page—while you know that the box of text in the top right needs to be read before that in the bottom left—is it reasonable to assume that the reader will also know that? How is the reader’s eye attracted to where they should “start” when consuming your poster—is the flow clearly identified using arrows or other formatting techniques?
5. Create Your Poster, Then Get Feedback
Few of us are confident or self-identify as artists or advertisers. Because of this, the act of physically creating your poster from your design, messages, and content can be intimidating and perturbing.
Graphic designers may be able to help—if you are friends with or have funds for one. But we believe all academic workers are creative (Clark & Sousa, 2018)—and this can be used to help you actually produce your poster. If this is not the case, modern software packages can make it much easier to create good designs. However, as with presentations, such packages can also create overly fussy, ugly, or otherwise cluttered designs that don’t help your primary purpose: to communicate.
Feedback is essential if you really care about the success of your poster. Once your poster has been created, share it with at least three other trusted colleagues for feedback. Ask them specific questions to understand whether your messages are being well communicated. For example, where does your eye go first? What is the key take away? Did you learn something new? What is missing? What could be removed?
6. Learn From Every Other Poster
Never personally had negative feedback on your own previous poster efforts? Unfortunately, don’t expect anyone to tell you that your poster is not working for them or is just plain bad. Conference attendees are usually far too polite and busy. Instead, judge your poster by how many people stop by: How long do they look? Do they appear to be interested, or excited? Do they ask more questions? If they appear like they are working hard or are confused, find out why.
Ironically, although we shouldn’t copy other’s posters, we can learn a lot from them. As with other parts of academic work, view your poster skills as falling in as much a zone of learning for you as writing or teaching skills. Every one of us can always learn to do better.
To help your future posters, as you visit conferences in future, every poster you see offers an exemplar of the academic poster genre represented. Develop your skills in breaking the poster down into its genre components (Table 1) and consider why and how the different components worked well (or otherwise) for you. Every poster offers an opportunity to learn about what is both good and undesirable for your own posters in future, especially in relation to aspects of content and design. Learn from every poster. For audiences and presenters alike, it’s in all our interests for every poster to be better.