Tips and Information for Posters

Your poster board will be set up in the lobby of the Halifax Marriott Harbourfront, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Please read through the following instructions and guidelines before preparing your poster display.

Poster requirements

Labels: Your poster must include the title, authors, affiliations and sponsor logos
Size: Final dimensions for posters to be finalized; please check back

Poster guidelines

What makes an effective poster? This question is not easy to answer because audience expectations vary from discipline to discipline. For instance, the audience of a medical poster session expects to see a different kind of poster than the audience of an engineering poster session expects. Nonetheless, here are some general guidelines that would apply to most situations in science:

Title

The title of an effective poster should quickly orient the audience. Here are some guidelines for poster titles:

• Make the title the most prominent block of text on the poster (either centered or left justified at the top).
• Do not typeset the title in all capital letters (such text is difficult to read).
• Use small words — such as of, from, with, to, the, and, a, and an — to separate details in the title.

While phrase titles are most common, some scientists and engineers effectively use sentence titles for posters that present one main result. In such titles, state the result in the title and capitalize the words as you would in a sentence. Because the sentence title stands alone, as opposed to being part of a paragraph, the period is generally dropped.

Overall impression

The poster as a whole should quickly orient the audience to the subject and purpose. One good test is whether the audience recognizes the subject and purpose within 20 seconds of seeing the poster. Usually, a poster accomplishes this goal with a well-crafted title and with supporting images. Also, make sure that the type is large enough to easily read and that there is enough contrast between the colour of the type and the background.

Location and identification of sections

Specific sections — such as the results — should be easy to locate on the poster. Once readers recognize what the work is, they decide how much energy to invest in the poster. For instance, many will read only the motivation for the work, the objectives (or goals) of the work, and then the final results. Others, who have a deep interest in the topic, will try to read the poster from beginning to end. Making it easy for them to follow along from section to section will increase their chances of reading the whole poster and understanding the project.

Design of sections

Design the individual sections of your poster so that they can be easily and quickly read. Given the distractions that can interrupt a person’s attempts to read posters in a symposium, the poster should not contain large blocks of text. Sentences should be short and to the point, in a large enough type for people to see without squinting or getting too close. When possible, sections should rely on images, such as photographs, drawings and graphs.

Poster template examples can be found at http://www.makesigns.com/SciPosters_Templates.aspx