1. Designing a Scientific Poster
Maggie Dickinson
Macaulay Instructional Technology Fellow
Queens College
(With slides borrowed from fellow ITF’s Russell Hogg and Craig Willse)

2. Today’s Goals: Understand project expectations
Learn the basics of poster design
Determine elements of successful poster design

3. What’s a Scientific Poster, Anyway?
Visual means for communicating research to an academic or professional community.
It is a summary of research that serves to create interest by highlighting most important findings.

5. Requirements Each group must produce one poster.
Posters can be made with Keynote, PowerPoint or Illustrator.
Poster dimensions must be 48” x 36” (or vice versa).

6. Due Dates
Poster presentations at Macaulay December 6th and 7th

7. What makes a poster succeed?

8. ideas effectively. Communicating your The Pavlov Principle
Pavlov, often referred to as one of the founding figures of behavioral psychology and a Nobel prize winner, is best known for his development of the concept of “classical conditioning”. What most people don’t know is that he wasn’t the first person to discover that the dogs would begin to salivate at the sound of the bell, even if there was no food present, if you always ring a bell right before you feed them. Another researcher had presented these same findings ten years before in a paper given at the University of Pennsylvania. Nobody knows this persons name, even though he presented basically the same data as Pavlov and well before him. Even though Pavlov wasn’t the first researcher to discover this phenomenon, he was the first person to successfully demonstrate its significance for understanding human and animal behavior. All this is to say, presentation matters. The same data in the hands of two different researchers meant obscurity for one and enduring fame for the other. What you say is important, but how you say it and how you show its relevance to others is just as important.
The Pavlov Principle

9. Design Matters: Avoid cluttering the poster (graphs, photos, etc.).
Images should guide the overall layout, not the text.
Avoid cluttering the poster (graphs, photos, etc.).
Watch your color contrasts.
Make sure all components are aligned properly.
Use some kind of underlying structure!

10. What makes a poster FAIL?

13. Text : Less is More Teeth & Life History
Teeth are ideal for studying life history because they grow incrementally, are not remodeled during an individual’s lifetime, and are not highly subject to environmental stresses.
Teeth & Life History
Incremental growth
Not remodeled
Resistant to environmental stress

14. How to Use Text:
Break text up with bullets or numbers. (Hint: This slide)
Indenting shows subordination
- Like this, see?
Avoid lengthy paragraphs that give far too much detail, like talking about why you did what you did and whether you dislike positivism because there is such a thing as reality out there and it operates in a certain way and we should be able to access that in some shape, form, or fashion and besides it’s all from some stuffy old dead guy thinking too hard, anyway.

15. How to Use Text:
Make sure your font colors stand out against the background.
Use fonts people can read!
- Titles & headings should be 40 to 70 pt.
- Body text should never be less than 14 pt.
Be consistent with colors and use them to guide the reader.
- E.g., you could use one color for headings, another for body text.

16. Templates for Poster Layout

17. Left to Right, Top to Bottom Flow
Title & Authors

18. Left to Right Flow in Rows
Title & Authors
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

19. Centered Image & Peripheral Explanations
Title & Authors

20. Centered Explanation, Peripheral Images
Title & Authors

21. Sample Posters

25. Resources for Poster Design
Apple tutorial for making a scientific poster:
“Advice on designing scientific posters” (Swarthmore College)   and Don’ts of Poster Presentation”
“Do’s and Don’ts of Poster Presentation” (The American Society for Cell Biology)  
“Creating Effective Poster Presentations” (North Carolina State University)