The Poster

Posters are an unusual beast. Very few people outside of the advertising and merchandising industry use posters to try to communicate with an audience, so creating one for a non-commercial purpose can be a challenge for a student until it’s clear what its job is to be. Posters are designed to be read by a standing or walking audience, displayed as part of a larger collection. This means that part of your poster’s job is to make someone stop and read. As a student, you’ll be asked to make posters to show you can balance the requirement to communicate your knowledge or data against the skill of being concise. The audience won’t begin to read if there’s too much text to get through in a couple of minutes. You need to become proficient in identifying your major points, convincing the reader why they’re worth reading about (i.e. opening with a strong introduction), and perhaps supporting all of this with images, figures, or graphs. Visuals should attract a walking audience member, and should help you convey a lot of information without resorting to long blocks of text. If you go into a career in academia, you’ll have to create posters to take to conferences. If not, posters created for your degree will probably be displayed in a similar setup, for example, in an open space for people to walk around. Conferences are opportunities for researchers to get together and listen to a small number of presentations from selected experts over the course of a few days, and to meet other researchers who may be working on similar topics and share notes or set up collaborations. A poster acts like a quick advert for a scientist and their research, and they’re usually displayed at specific networking sessions during the course of a conference where everyone is free to walk through the display hall and speak with the authors while they’re stood next to their posters.