Research Poster Presentation

Before you start designing your poster, you will want to do some planning. Ask yourself the following questions.

• Who is my audience?

Are you presenting at a discipline-specific conference or at an interdisciplinary conference? This question will help you determine the content of your poster and whether you need to write your poster to be understood by those outside your discipline.

• What are the conference requirements?

Does the conference ask for a vertically-aligned poster or a horizontally-aligned poster? Are there specific size requirements? If there are no requirements explicitly listed on the conference website or conveyed to you through your acceptance notification, don’t assume there are none—find a contact for the conference and ask!

• What do posters presented at this conference/in my discipline look like?

Do a search on Google Images for the name of the conference and poster to get an idea of the types of posters presented and how they are laid out. If you want to get a sense of how posters look in your discipline, do this same search for a few conferences in your field. If you are unfamiliar with the big conferences in your field, search Google for professional organizations in your discipline. Those organizations often host conferences.

Overview

Storyboards are often used in the film and television industry to plan out scenes, and they can be equally as helpful in planning a poster. Storyboarding your poster is a great way to visualize how you want to arrange your content and how much space you will need to devote to each piece of content.

Materials needed

• Poster-sized paper, piece of poster board, clean tabletop, or other large surface
• Post-it notes, construction paper, or copy paper
• Markers or colored pencils 

Directions

The poster-sized paper, poster board, or tabletop will function as your poster. The Post-its, construction paper, or letter-sized paper will function as the pieces of your poster (e.g., content boxes, title space, photos, and charts or graphs). The markers and colored pencils will allow you to fill in additional details.

Using your markers or colored pencils, begin defining your pieces of content. Write in headings (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, etc.) on your Post-its or pieces of paper. Draw quick sketches on additional sheets to represent photos, charts, or graphs you plan to include. Once you have all your content pieces defined, begin laying out the pieces of your poster. Think about where you might want to place content boxes, where you will place any images, and how much space you will need for each element on your poster. If your layout is not working, shuffle things around until you find one that does.

Once you have a layout you like, use your markers or colored pencils to begin filling in details. Will your content boxes float on the page or will they have a border? If they will have borders, go ahead and draw those. Are you including a chart or graph? If so, what colors will you use to represent the data? When you have a product you like, take a picture of it so you can refer back.

Your final poster may end up looking nothing like your storyboard, and that is fine! This exercise is a great way to think about your research and how best to display it without feeling constrained by the program you use to create your poster.