Posters : Mechanical Engineering Communication Lab

Criteria for Success

Deliberately choose your audience and what message you want to share with them.
Have a 20 second pitch.
Design your poster around your pitch.
Layer your message: have a title and key figures that convey meaning quickly, and supporting details for the interested viewer.
Reduce “visual noise” with simple tricks to make a poster that is pleasing to the eye.

Structure Diagram

A majority of your poster (aim for 75%+) should be figures. The exact layout will depend on what you choose to highlight and who your audience is. Take a look at the examples at the end of this article for the same content used in two different poster structures.

Possible poster structures to emphasize results, methods, or process.

Identify your purpose + Analyze your audience

There are a lot of different reasons to want to present a poster, and what your purpose is will inform who your audience is as well. The table below provides just a few examples of good reasons to present a poster and who the intended audience for that purpose could be.

If your purpose is...	Your audience could be...
Winning a competition	Judges with a predefined scoring rubric
Sharing a critical, broadly impactful discovery that will influence interdisciplinary fields	Both experts and people peripheral to your field who fill feel the influence of your discovery
Attract collaborators to build on your work or fill in missing gaps	Others who mutually have a desire to collaborate and are looking for gaps to fill
Presenting to high school students or local community members	Non-experts who have little to no advanced scientific knowledge (but who may be eager!)
Recruiting new lab members	Undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs who are looking for a position in a lab (could be at another institution or your own)
Building your network, e.g., to find a job	Recruiters in industry, professors looking for students
Pitch your project to acquire funding, e.g., grants or VC	Project managers from government agencies, venture capitalists and investors, representatives from companies
Get experience presenting your work and talking to an audience	Anyone who wants to hear you talk!
Establish priority or raise awareness	People in your field who are working on the same/similar things to make sure they cite you
Build a publication record and grow your resume	Anyone who wants to hear you talk—comes for free with any other purpose you have for sharing!

You rarely have only one purpose. Most of the time, it’s a mixture of a few of the above bullet points (or something else). In that case, you need to be wary of how to communicate to your different audience segments in a way that is complementary and synergistic. Otherwise, your poster may end up feeling disjointed.

Skills

Craft your 20-second pitch

A poster session is a tough gig. If your poster is hard to understand, people will just move on. The most common question at a poster session is some variation on “So, what’s all this about?” The next 20 seconds are critical: a strong summary of your main message, results, and conclusion will spark a conversation, but too many unconnected details can lose your audience.

A strong pitch has five parts:

1. Something that every single person in the room cares about	“Waterborne diseases claim a large number of lives each year in the developing world.
2. Why we need to know/do more about that thing	One of the primary causes is the lack of affordable water filters…
3. What you did in this project	The aim of this project is to develop low-cost water filters based on plant tissues to filter out pathogens.
4. What your results mean	These filters could provide safe drinking water for people near the bottom of the economics pyramid
5. How your results contribute to the thing everyone cares about	…improving their everyday life.”

Practice your pitch, then refine it as you get to know your audience better. More details on short pitches can also be found in the Elevator Pitch : Mechanical Engineering Communication Lab article.

Once you have your pitch, use your pitch to guide your visual content.

Arrangement and Flow

Does the structure of your poster match your pitch?

Most posters arrange their material into boxes with a navigation system that is intuitive (for the reader!) and goes from introduction to main result to implications, with details that are essential to the message but don’t fit in the flow relegated to the bottom or corners. Exactly which boxes you include depends on your message. It’s wise to label your boxes with sentences or phrases that convey the message of the box. A title like “Brackish groundwater in India” is far more informative than “Introduction”. If you can’t formulate a strong message-title for a box, it might mean that the box isn’t saying anything important!

Key tip: A great way to determine what you want to include is to practice your presentation before you even make your poster, and make a note of what you want to talk about, and in what order.

Poster Design

Try and avoid the 7 deadly poster design sins of poster design:

Copying and pasting figures from a paper
Low quality images that are pixelated at full scale
Too much text
Tight layout – whitespace is your friend
General sloppiness – misaligned text and lines, typos
Too many colors and fonts – graphic unity
Lines too thin or too thick – most defaults are too thin

Reducing Noise and Text

Once you have your pitch and flow, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about how they will interact with your poster. “Noise” in the context of a poster may be visual or cognitive and includes any extra work your viewer must do to understand your poster that is separate from learning about your work. To avoid noise: Use clean san serif fonts that are appropriately sized (eg your title should be visible from 15 feet away). Also consider how you will be part of the poster presentation: especially if you will be standing at your poster, reduce written text as much as possible. Ask: Can you replace your text with a figure?

An example of reducing text and replacing it with bullets and figures by John Casey

To make your results clear, replace blocks of text with images, and emphasize only key points with text. A good way to force this on yourself is to keep a minimum font size of 32 pt, and don’t include any text smaller than that. (Credit to John Casey, BE Communication Lab, for the images)

Figure Design – Color and Size

What’s the motivation? What are the implications? What approach did you take? The visuals on the poster are for answering questions like these. Aim to answer most of these questions with figures and short captions, and very sparing text.

Figures on a poster are not the same as figures in a paper. Glance at one of your figures and ask: what is the first thing I see?
Communicate one message per figure and remove information that distracts from the main point.
Unify colors across all visuals. Highlights in one area of your poster will be visible as your audience looks at the rest, use this to your advantage and uniformly color code key equations, variables, forces, or data sets when you want to highlight them throughout.
Beware of red (or other bright colors). Colors can carry unintended meaning (red=bad) or distract from a more important message.

For more detail on figures, see the Figure Design CommKit.

Last Minute Checklist

Use a projector to see how large your visuals are before sending them for printing. Do you end up standing in front of a key result accidentally? What do you point to a lot while talking? Move this to the center of your poster.
Make sure you follow the formatting requirements for your event (poster dimensions, title block arrangement)
Add your email, QR code, or LinkedIn so that people can reach out to you.
Printing is expensive and sometimes takes a while, be ready before your deadline
- Different poster materials exist: canvas, glossy, paper –
Make sure to have a poster tube to avoid wrinkles (and put your name/contact info on the tube in case you accidentally leave it somewhere!)