Podcast – How to create award winning academic posters

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Francesca La Frenais:

Hello, my name is Francesca La Frenais and welcome to our podcast recording for the NIHR Dementia Researcher website. Before we started, I wanted to make a few announcements from this week. We want to thank everyone who’s making use of the site and celebrate having reached over 500 registered users. Thank you, please tell your friends, and continue to spread the word.

Francesca La Frenais:

This week, I’m joined by a fantastic panel in the studio to talk on the topic of poster design. First, I’m joined by Dr. Claire Durrant, a postdoctoral researcher working at the University of Cambridge. Claire’s work is focused on understanding mechanisms of synapse loss and exploring ways to prevent this happening.

Francesca La Frenais:

Second, Dr. Aoife Kiely, a research communications officer working at the Alzheimer’s Society, who’s previously done multiple postdocs, including one at UCL at Queen Square Brain Bank.

Francesca La Frenais:

Finally, Yolanda O’Hene, a PhD student at UCL. Yolanda’s work focuses on the development of new MRI techniques for Alzheimer’s disease.

Francesca La Frenais:

So welcome everyone. Today, we’ll be talking about conference posters. Posters can be an effective networking tool, something we know is important from our previous podcasts, as well as being an effective way to articulately communicate your research. However, too many posters fail to be really engaging. With our panelists today, we hope to offer guidance on how to produce a fantastic award-winning conference poster thinking about the abstract, concept, and design.

Francesca La Frenais:

So let’s ease into the discussion with a quick round the table. Can you please tell me a little bit about yourselves and your research and the last poster that you presented? So if we start with Claire.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Hi, I’m Claire. So I study organotypic slice culture models of Alzheimer’s disease. I’m really interested in synapses, why they die in Alzheimer’s particularly. So the last poster I presented was at the Alzheimer’s Research UK conference up in London, I believe. The next one I’ll be doing will be at the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.

Francesca La Frenais:

Thank you.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Hi, I am Aoife Kiely. I work at Alzheimer’s Society. I’m a research communications officer now, so I really had to think about when my last poster was. I think it was the Federation of European Neuroscience meeting, FENS, when it was in Copenhagen. That was when I was presenting on my work on microglia in multiple system atrophy.

Yolanda O’Hene:

Hi, my name is Yolanda O’Hene, and I’m a PhD student at UCL. My work focuses on the development of a new MRI technique to have a look at how water moves from the blood and into the tissue. This potentially is a novel way of looking at things that go wrong in Alzheimer’s disease.

Yolanda O’Hene:

The last poster that I presented, I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. So I presented a poster there. The one before that was Alzheimer’s Research UK in London.

Francesca La Frenais:

Brilliant, thank you. I guess Aoife, you’ve probably seen a lot of posters recently in your role, so maybe thinking about more recent ones as well.

Francesca La Frenais:

Posters have been described as a visual representation of your abstract. Before we talk about designing the poster, how do you go about drafting an abstract?

Dr Claire Durrant:

So I think it’s really important to consider your audience particularly. So, for example, if you’re going to an Alzheimer’s conference, probably not worth wasting a few hundred words on what Alzheimer’s disease is and how it affects people. Sort of go straight into where your work fits within the global remit that we all understand in that.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Whereas if you’re going to, say, Society for Neuroscience, you have to maybe add that extra sentence introduction to just state what Alzheimer’s is and why your question’s important for that.

Francesca La Frenais:

Yeah, thanks. I think that’s a really good point about thinking about your audience.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Yeah, and I’d also add onto that because at some conferences, like the Alzheimer’s Society conference, we have a mixed audience. There’s kind of lay people there, people living with dementia, as well as researchers. So sometimes you kind of have to consider the language that you use there just to make it accessible to everybody who’s going to be taking a look.

Yolanda O’Hene:

Also, I suppose always remembering the headline of your research and actually the main message of what you want to tell everyone at that conference. I think that’s also quite important.

Francesca La Frenais:

Yeah, that kind of leads quite nicely onto the next question, because we’re going to be thinking about the poster and the text that’s involved in that. So there’s usually a pretty standard formula, kind of the background in knowledge gap, and touching usually quite briefly on the methods, the results, conclusion, and maybe some points for further discussion. Do you tend to follow this formula, and what do you think of the obvious traps when trying to work to these?

Yolanda O’Hene:

I think that people often perhaps use too much text, and so I try to use as many figures to explain either the methods or even the introduction. Also, if you can make your figures for your results really clear, then that’s what people are quite interested in. Avoiding text, using visuals, because it’s a visual medium.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Definitely, yeah. I always take in mind about the facts that usually I’d like to be standing next to my poster. So you don’t often need that much text. Enough that someone, if they were standing at the back and couldn’t hear you, would to be able to read it.

Dr Claire Durrant:

But, for example, if I’m describing a methods, I would much rather have a diagram of the process which I’ve made myself. So it’s my own images, and it sort of adds to the whole look of the poster as well. But much nicer than a big wall of, “I’ve added X microliters of this,” which no one wants to see.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Yeah, because I think a lot of people tend to fall into the trap of I’ve got this fantastic research paper, I’m just going to copy and paste it onto a bigger board so people can just see everything I’ve done. But I think some of the massive conferences, you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of posters, and you have to kind of make your work eye-catching as well.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

So one thing I know different research institutes are doing more and more is having it kind of color-coded so people can spot and say, “Oh, these are all the UCL ones. I know that’s really nice research. I’ll go to there.” Then if it’s visually appealing as well, you’re going to net people in. But also, being there standing at your poster is making people more likely to stop, because they’ve got someone to talk to.

Francesca La Frenais:

Yeah. Is there anything that you find can be quite eye-catching about posters? As you said, big conference, lots of posters. People can’t look at every single one.

Dr Claire Durrant:

I love images. That’s the thing. We don’t change from when we’re children. We like pretty pictures. It’s much easier to understand a picture. For me, if there is a big fluorescent image of the cell type they’re looking at or of a hippocampus, I know I’m looking for hippocampus posters. I can see one from a mile away down the corridor, whereas trying to find that in an abstract book might be a bit harder.

Yolanda O’Hene:

I quite enjoy when people also include a summary. So something that’s like it just takes the key points of their results. It’s quite easy to digest, because often posters are quite complicated. So to have it condensed down is a really nice touch.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point about the take-home messages, because it can be really overwhelming, particularly if you’re trying to read a lot of text that’s on the poster or even just trying to understand the images to kind of pull out that information if the person isn’t standing there to help you.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

But yeah, I would say the other point would be just to make sure that everything is as visible to somebody who’s standing at least a meter away from your poster and is being probably jostled by other people.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Definitely.

Yolanda O’Hene:

Also, I think a good point to add is perhaps a poster which I once saw that was really not eye-catching. It contained about 10 tables of numbers, and so that’s really hard to digest and also very, very dull. So maybe avoid that.

Francesca La Frenais:

Something to avoid for the listeners. So kind of moving on to the fun part, which is formatting and design, do you tend to use graphs and images? I think it sounds like you all do. How should you use them? Any tips?

Dr Claire Durrant:

Well, I think it’s quite important for all your graphs to be in the same style, because if you’ve got one graph that’s got red and black bars, one graph that’s a line one, one that’s got dot plots, I tend to like to format it in a similar way so it looks like you would present it for a paper. So they’re all the same and much easier to present in that way.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

One thing that appealed to me a few times when I’ve been judging posters, I like when it’s formatted really clearly as in like background, this is what we did, this is what we found. Whether you do that with different colored rectangles or something to kind of block it out as tiles, I find that really useful.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Secondly, a thing that I’ve done myself was, either in your conclusions or your take-home message, have clear bullet points. Or you can just make it, if possible, into a diagram so people can really just take that information really quickly.

Yolanda O’Hene:

Yeah, I was going to add that point as well, that I quite enjoy when people make their methods into schematics or flow diagrams in order to kind of follow a little bit more easily.

Yolanda O’Hene:

I think what’s a point to know is that these things aren’t very easy to do. To conceptualize something that you’ve written down in steps or to make it into a schematic is a skill in itself,-

Dr Claire Durrant:

Definitely.

Yolanda O’Hene:

… but worth doing in order to kind of convey your message clearly.

Francesca La Frenais:

You all work with quite complex methodology. Is there any tips for how much you include or not include when trying to describe those methods?

Dr Claire Durrant:

I would say things like the exact amount of something you’re doing or the exact time might not necessarily be important. But if you were to just describe it to someone in the lab about how you’d do it, and then you can go and assist them later, that should be enough kind of thing. It’s not a methods paper. It’s not something that someone who’s trying to learn the technique will sit and study. It’s someone who’s, “Okay, what did that person do? I got a vague idea.” If they really want to ask you really detailed questions, they can. But a poster, I don’t think, is the place for that. That’s a paper’s place, definitely.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

I think that’s a really good thing about posters is that people probably will come up to you and say, “Oh, I’ve done a similar experiment. We use two microliters. How much do you use?”

Dr Claire Durrant:

Exactly.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Even just the little fine tuning things that you don’t even write in a paper, it’s really handy to be able to have those conversations, and it’s a totally different dynamic from when you’re standing presenting on a stage.

Yolanda O’Hene:

I’d agree.

Francesca La Frenais:

I guess it’s a good way to get people to interact with you as well if they’ve got those questions.

Francesca La Frenais:

So going back a little bit to the design, how do you use color? Do you use color on your posters? Do you have a color scheme that you like or any tips?

Yolanda O’Hene:

I think there’s quite a lot of research into what people find, they’re serious and there’s different colors that you can use, different color schemes if you want.

Francesca La Frenais:

[inaudible 00:11:29].

Yolanda O’Hene:

Yeah, exactly, in order to convey the message as you would want to. But I think a key … Not a key point, but I think an interesting point that someone told me was always to be aware of people who are colorblind,-

Francesca La Frenais:

Definitely.

Yolanda O’Hene:

… because that’s also something that quite a lot of scientists maybe don’t take that into consideration. So just to be aware of the colors that clash and you can’t tell the differences between.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Well, particularly, we’re all guilty of using red and green as our sort of two primary staining colors. But just changing red to magenta just makes a huge difference for people who are colorblind. So we kind of forget that. Obviously, this is a different stain to that one, and actually it looks entirely the same color to someone. So just that five minutes changing it on image [inaudible 00:12:16], and you can make it much more accessible to someone else.

Francesca La Frenais:

Oh, so I never thought of that. No.

Yolanda O’Hene:

We all know those presentations, PowerPoint presentations, where they have a blue background and yellow text, and it hurts your eyeballs. Like don’t do that to your poster either.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Or blue and red. Absolute worst.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Horrible. My PhD supervisor would never let me have my posters the color I wanted, because I worked on a protein that’s linked to Parkinson’s called PINK1. So it’s obvious, I wanted to make my posters pink, but she flat out disagreed with that logic.

Yolanda O’Hene:

I think it’s quite nice to use colors to emphasize different areas. So the parts in which you want to highlight if you use the color scheme across the board and maybe have the background that color instead of being white. I think that’s quite a nice approach to take.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Some people use a nice method. They’ll have like a nearly kind of watermarked image in the background. Just have a neuron or maybe their institute’s insignia or something like that, which again ties together posters from the same institute, which I think is quite nice.

Francesca La Frenais:

So there’s just kind of quick fire questions. What software do you use to design your posters?

Dr Claire Durrant:

I use PowerPoint.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

PowerPoint.

Yolanda O’Hene:

Yeah, PowerPoint all the way. My sister always laughs at me, because she says, “You’re doing a PhD, but all I see you doing is PowerPoint.”

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Well, it is very high level PowerPoint though.

Yolanda O’Hene:

Yeah, exactly.

Francesca La Frenais:

I was really surprised when I started designing that people were using PowerPoint. I thought there’d be something else. But if it works, it works.

Francesca La Frenais:

Do you tend to do landscape or portrait?

Dr Claire Durrant:

Obviously, different conference guidelines will ask for different things. So make sure you read that, because there’s so many times you go to a conference and they’re all portrait, and there’s that one poor person who’s holding up the end of it, because they didn’t read it. But that looks bad, so you definitely need to check. There’s no poster prize winner who’s ever done that. So I think that would be a number one thing to check.

Francesca La Frenais:

Yeah, excellent [inaudible 00:14:18] conference guidelines. Do you work left or right or kind of top down?

Dr Aoife Kiely:

I think it depends. I think usually I would have done like top down in columns, but I think you can play around with that as long as it’s really clear. If you have like arrows guiding the sections or kind of a flow chart thing, I think you can really play around.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Even just numbering your sections as well can make it quite clear which one you’re supposed to read.

Yolanda O’Hene:

Yeah, as long as there’s a flow, I think that it doesn’t … Yeah, whichever you fancy, or I fancy.

Francesca La Frenais:

Where do you stand on kind of including contact information or having handouts alongside your poster?

Dr Claire Durrant:

I always include my email address, handouts less so for me. I think if it was a very specialist conference, I might include handouts. But for a very general one, I would almost rather people just speak to me directly, or I’ll sometimes have a QR code link to a paper, and people can take a photo of that on their phones and go and see the published work. Sometimes, you’re a bit worried about giving someone all your unpublished data in just a handout they can take away. In some conferences, you do have to be careful of that. But for most cases, I’m fairly relaxed.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Yeah, I like the QR code thing. That’s [crosstalk 00:15:35].

Francesca La Frenais:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:15:35].

Yolanda O’Hene:

Yeah. It’s really good. I have seen that before and taken the picture and thought, “That’s really a great way to remember someone’s details.”

Dr Claire Durrant:

You don’t even have to put it on your poster, you can just put it on a piece of A4 paper and pin it up next to your poster. So that’s what I’ve done on a few occasions. “Oh, if you liked this, I’ve got a paper published,” and they can go and look at it, which benefits everyone. I think.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

I also think it’s worth getting business cards printed, because especially at the larger conferences, especially like the American conferences, they’ll always come up to you with business cards. Sometimes, you just feel really awkward if you’re just like writing your email on a scrap of paper. So yeah, I think that’s really useful.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

I definitely agree with you about the handouts. I think in a lot of cases it can be that it’s too risky to give away your unpublished data; and in other cases, it can just be a hassle to print out these handouts that people aren’t going to look at or are going to throw away or whatever.

Francesca La Frenais:

Think of the trees.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Yeah. Think of the trees.

Francesca La Frenais:

Yes, ethical panel. Any thoughts on printing? Do you prefer kind of shiny paper, laminated fabric posters?

Dr Claire Durrant:

Well, I have a real thing for fabric, simply because I’ve had some awful experience in airports with the big poster tubes. Absolute nightmare. I have had nightmares with fabric. Do not iron a fabric poster. I did this before the [AR 00:16:55] UK conference two years ago, and it looked like some sort of Dali painting. Fortunately, the stuff on it was okay, but it was very warped. So don’t do what I did and sit panicking at a hotel room at 10:00 at night going, “What have I done?” So just fold it gently and leave it with the crease. The crease is better than a Salvador Dali painting, definitely.

Yolanda O’Hene:

And don’t forget your poster in the airport as well. I’ve heard many horror stories about that.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Actually, I love the fabric posters as well, because like you said, so much easier to travel with. But I do know there is a researcher in UCL who upholstered a chair with an old fabric poster. So they’re reusable. It’s fantastic.

Dr Claire Durrant:

You can make bags from them.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Love it.

Francesca La Frenais:

But that is [inaudible 00:17:39] certainly an idea.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

A dress, skirt? Yeah, lovely.

Francesca La Frenais:

For the final question, as award-winning poster designers, what would be your top tips for someone working on a poster design? Anything we haven’t covered yet.

Dr Claire Durrant:

As well as the design of the poster, think about how you’re going to present it. Make it in a way that you can almost do a three-minute mini talk through your poster, and that you’re not sitting there going, “Oh, what was that piece of data?” Just know it really well and that you can smoothly talk them through. If someone asks you a question, you know exactly where on the poster you’re pointing them to. So you’re not reading off it. It’s kind of a visual guide to help you talk to the person standing in front.

Yolanda O’Hene:

I’d say take your time thinking about how you want to portray the information, because a lot of people look at your poster when you’re not there as well. Just thinking about ways that this information can be given and understood to people when they’re not there, I think that’s quite important.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Yeah. I would say thinking about how you’re going to talk through your poster is really vital. I would also say stand at your poster as often as you can, really make use of the time. Enjoy the time, because it can seem really nerve-wracking when you’re just standing there by yourself and nobody’s coming up to you. But some of the conversations that you’ll have at your poster are going to be some of the most useful for your research.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

People come up with great input and really willing to help and just give you advice and also get advice from you. So yeah, it can be a really, really valuable experience. That’s what the judges are going to enjoy as well, is somebody who’s really passionate about their research, knowledgeable, and just happy to be there.

Dr Claire Durrant:

I must admit, I’m the kind of person who just camps at their poster whenever it’s up. I’m really lucky that my PI Michael, Michael Coleman, he’ll bring me food. He’ll go to the buffet for me and bring it, because he know I won’t leave it. So I’ll be stuck waiting and looking like the loner in the poster room when everyone’s queuing for lunch. But that first person who walks through the door, I’ll say hi.

Dr Aoife Kiely:

Yeah. [Inaudible 00:19:38].

Yolanda O’Hene:

I suppose think of yourself as like a graphic designer for just one day when you’re making your poster.

Francesca La Frenais:

Brilliant, some fantastic tips there. So thank you so much for taking the time to share those tips, not just about the content and the design of the poster, but kind of the whole experience. You standing there as well thinking about your audience and, if possible, enlisting someone to bring you food as you stand there.

Dr Claire Durrant:

What are the PIs for if not to bring you lunch?

Francesca La Frenais:

So it’s time to end today’s podcast recording. I’d like to thank our panelists, Aoife, Yolanda, and Claire. You can visit our website to look at the profiles for all of our panelists, and please do post questions in our comments section. If you’ve anything to add on this topic, please do post your comments in the forum on our website, or get in touch on Twitter using #ecrdementia. We also suggest you take a look at our blog link on our website, where there’s a great article written by a blogger called Tullio Rossi for the LSE Impact Blog. He’s got some great tips for poster design. And please remember to subscribe to this podcast through SoundCloud and iTunes, and tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks for listening. Bye.

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