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Posters are often used as part of student assessments. How might you plan and design an academic poster? How do you produce it effectively?
At university, students are often assessed on poster design. Posters are an effective way of communicating concisely, visually and attractively, and can be a powerful way of getting information across. Academic posters summarise information or research concisely and attractively, to help publicise it and generate discussion.
Posters are widely used in the academic community, and most conferences include poster presentations in their programme. Academic posters can reach a wide audience as they may be displayed for several hours or days, at national or international conferences. They may also be published online as part of conference proceedings, becoming part of a permanent record of research activity.
An effective poster can make a strong impact, so it's worth developing your poster planning skills.
At university, you will often find that one of your course assessments requires you to produce a poster, either individually or in a group. The criteria used to assess your poster will be weighted differently depending on your discipline.
In some courses, content and structure may be weighted at 60%, with visual organisation and presentation weighted at 40% - check your guidelines to find out how your own assessment will be weighted.
Assessment criteria are likely to focus on features such as:
You might use PowerPoint or other software to produce a poster, or you might produce it by hand, for example using a flip chart, marker pens or poster paper.
Remember: Follow the guidelines given by your lecturer.
However you produce it, an effective academic poster should be well researched and effectively organised. It should also be attractively presented.
Q Can you identify some strong features of visual design in each of these examples?
Go to our answer further on, or continue to read more about poster planning and design.
An academic poster is designed to communicate clearly, concisely, and visually. It should also be self-explanatory. You shouldn't need notes to understand it!
It takes skill to summarise a complex topic without losing some meaning or connections. What do you need to consider first? How might you use images or diagrams to help convey your message?
Since a poster must communicate so concisely, you will need to spend some time identifying your key points.
Decide what you need to communicate, and how. What is your main message? What does your viewer need to know? Identify the key points, always keeping your topic or task in mind.
Once you've decided on the main content, make a rough draft of the information you need.
Remember: Academic posters need to show evidence of reading and research, so you must always include references.
Like other types of academic writing, an academic poster should be well organised, with clear headings and subheadings. The structure you choose depends on the task you have been given.
Here are two examples:
If you are reporting on a piece of research, your structure will be similiar to a research report:
If you are illustrating how a particular problem was solved, or how a challenge was addressed, the structure might be:
Remember: The structure depends on your content, and what you need to communicate.
Remember: However you produce your poster, the same general rules for planning and design apply.
Once you've identified your main content and structure, you need to identify the graphics and formatting which will communicate your message best. How will you organise your content visually? How might you use colour and type to enhance visual impact?
It's usually best to design from the outside in, thinking about the general purpose before the details.
Remember: It's important to be very clear about the purpose of your poster. Keep returning to this as you plan your design.
Posters are designed to convey a message quickly and efficiently. What should your viewer see and understand first?
Tip: In an academic poster, the priority is to be clear, concise and professional.
What visual arrangement will suit your content best, and how will you lead the reader through it?
These are examples of 'thumbnail' designs. In thumbnails, you sketch designs in miniature, showing images and text as primitive shapes like squares and circles, perhaps using shading to show the areas you want to stand out most.
Once the basic layout is planned you can consider graphic and text formatting in more detail.
An academic poster needs to be clear and legible from a distance. How might you format the text? What size should it be?
An academic poster should be both professional and concise, so a general rule is only to include graphics that really support your content.
Q What might be the purpose of each of these graphics?
At the start, we asked you to look at some example academic posters. Now look at them again.
Q Can you identify some strong features of visual design in each of these examples?
Compare your response to our answers, below.
Our feedback
Poster 1. This poster is well laid out over two columns, with an effective balance of text and graphics. The diagrams could have become cluttered and hard to read, but here are tidily organised with key features clearly highlighted. Overall, the layout is a little irregular, which helps provide visual interest.
Subject: Engineering1
Poster 2. This poster is unusually informal in style, which
is appropriate for its people-centred subject. The visual focus
is on a cheery central character, surrounded by speech bubbles.
The golden colours are positive, warm and inviting.
Subject: Student Experience2
Poster 3. This poster is concise and well organised, with clear headings and subheadings (just seen, in dark blue). Code examples are boxed in white so that they stand out clearly from the main text; images are consistently formatted and grouped. The light blue background tint is calm and helps tie it all together.
Subject: Computer Science3
How did your responses compare with ours? Perhaps your suggestions were different.
Perhaps you can also see how much can be communicated visually, even without reading the text.
Remember: It's the content that counts!
A variety of software can be used to produce an academic poster.
One of the most popular is Microsoft PowerPoint, with a key advantage being that most computers have PowerPoint installed as standard. This allows you to share your work easily, and update it from any location. For example, you may need to add new information just before presentation.
Using PowerPoint you can integrate a range of media, produce diagrams and flowcharts easily, and create custom charts and graphs from your data.
A0 118.9 cm x 84.1 cm
A1 84.1 cm x 59.4 cm
A2 59.4 cm x 42.0 cm
A3 42.0 cm x 29.7 cm
Choose Portrait or Landscape orientation.
Tip: To set the document size in PowerPoint, choose File > Page Layout > Slide Size > Custom > [ insert the size you want ]
Remember: To print effectively, images should be high resolution (150-300 dpi).
At academic conferences and seminars, people gather to hear about and discuss issues relevant to their subject area, and to meet others interested in the same challenges and questions.
At a poster presentation, you will normally be asked to stand beside your poster, say a few words, and answer questions. This allows people to discuss the content in a more informal, less threatening setting than during an oral presentation, which might have a very large audience. It is also possible to have more detailed one to one discussions with the people who are interested in your poster.
First, allow plenty of time to prepare and produce your poster. You will need to plan your content, design the layout, write and edit it, organise production and printing. It's also a good idea to prepare handouts for people to take away.
Make sure you know the time, date, and location of the session. Check the arrangements for display. You might need to produce your poster to a certain size, laminate it, provide Velcro tabs…
Think about what you will say, anticipate likely questions and practise your responses.
Tip: If your poster is to be distributed online, convert it to PDF (Portable Document Format).
Thanks to the following individuals and organisations who kindly allowed us to reproduce their posters here:
1 T Breckon, Cranfield University, UK
2 F Campbell, Edinburgh Napier University, UK
3 J Glauert, University of East Anglia,
UK
Anne Chirnside, Mary Hutchison
First published June 2007. Last updated 11 January 2009.
Students
said…