Designing an Academic Poster: Poster Tips and Tricks

Start your design on paper. Storyboard your poster by drawing it first to begin to visualize how your design will look and the balance you want to strike for your design.

Use strong visual elements to draw an audience in and highlight your most important takeaways.

Use the Dartmouth Style Guide to build your poster and ensure it aligns with Dartmouth colors, fonts, and logo use. It's important to highlight your affiliations on your poster. The different schools at Dartmouth have repositories for their logos: Geisel, Guarini, Thayer, and Tuck

Design your poster with blank space. Use blank space to balance your designs, emphasize important points, and to avoid visually overtaxing your audience. Challenge yourself to present quality over quantity on your poster.

Collect images, graphs, charts, and flow diagrams from the beginning of your research. Make a folder, and create a naming system to track your media. A standardized file name might include the date (YYYYMMDD format is preferred by computers) and the project. For example "20240301_experiment101" or "20240301_labnotebook" might work well.
You may also need to simplify graphs and charts for your poster.

What is the main takeaway from your research? Think about it and write it down. Is the main takeaway reflected in the title of the poster? If someone spent a minute skimming through the poster can they easily find a sentence discussing it? If it isn't in your poster, you will need to modify your designs to feature it. Better to design with the key takeaways in mind!

Sometimes when designing a poster, it can be easiest to work backwards. By writing what you plan to say about your research, you naturally select the important things to highlight which you can then reflect in your poster. Remember that not everyone you see at your poster session has the same knowledge of your topic, or a background that can make sense of it when it is shrouded in jargon. Good science communication emphasizes that you use language appropriate to your audience to discuss your topic. No matter what, sometimes plain language is best.
As you consider your poster, write three version of your presentation:

1. The 5 minute sidewalk talk for the passerby
2. The elaborate, methods heavy version to demonstrate understanding of research design and outcomes
3. The future focused version highlighting the results, applications of this new understanding, and future research you might carry out based on the results.