Poster Perfect: Tips & Tricks for Creating a Successful Research Poster

For more information or to schedule this course, please contact Gary Atwood <gatwood@uvm.edu>.

In this face-to-face workshop, we will review some of the key mistakes that people make when creating and presenting a research poster and discuss how to fix them. Participants will be able to: identify and explain the purpose of each poster section, select and apply an appropriate typeface and font size, prepare and insert appropriate images, follow basic rules for laying out information on a poster, explain different printing options, and discuss different strategies for presenting a poster. Approximately 70% of the presentation will be lecture and 30% group activity where participants apply the information presented by critiquing sample posters. Groups will share the design issues they've found and will suggest corrections.

Learning Objectives

1 – Define what an academic poster is and identify the required sections

2 – Describe the content that should be entered into each required section

3 – Select an appropriate font, font size, font color and apply basic rules for text layout

4 – Select appropriate images, graphs, or illustrations and properly insert those non-textual elements into the poster

5 – Layout all the elements of a poster according to generally accepted principles for readability 6 – Asses poster printing options and select the most appropriate one for their situation

7 – Describe common poster presentation strategies

Agenda

Introduction - 5 min

Purpose of academic posters - 10 min (lecture, group activity - pretest, critiquing a mock poster with lots of design flaws)

Topic One - General Design Principles - 15 min (active lecture, includes questions for participants that illustrate issues)

Topic Two - Text - (10 min (active lecture, includes questions for participants that illustrate issues)

Topic Three - Photos & Charts - 15 min (active lecture, includes questions for participants that illustrate issues)

Poster Critique - 10 min (group activity where attendees apply concepts by critiquing real posters)

Printing and Presenting posters - 15 min (lecture, hands on with different poster materials)

Conclusion - 10 min (Q&A period)

Facility Requirements

Speaker's podium, laptop, projector, seating arranged around tables (if possible) to facilitate group discussion, 2 large tables to layout sample posters.

MLA CE Credits: 1.5

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