Designing a Scientific Research Poster

Whether for virtual or onsite conferences, posters remain a common request from clients in the medical communications space and it’s often one of the tasks you’ll encounter in grad school or as a post doc if you have to present your research.

Poster presentations are a useful way to present preliminary research findings succinctly through a combination of text and graphics. A scientific poster is a design hybrid between an oral presentation and a manuscript; it is more detailed and interactive than an oral presentation but less detailed than a manuscript and does not have to undergo peer review unlike a published manuscript.

Poster development includes two major elements, content and layout development and requires both clear and concise writing skills and an understanding of the basics of graphic design.

An effective poster conveys a simple, clear story in the form of bulleted text and diagrams/images. The content of the poster should interest the audience and provide them with a clear take-home message that they can grasp in the few minutes they spend near your poster.

A poster starts with a title, introduction, background, methods, results, and concludes with the summary of findings and their implications for research as well as a reference list, all presented in a visually appealing format.

It’s nothing to be intimidated about though. With this course, you’ll learn step-by-step the easy way to create a poster and how to make it look professional. We’ll discuss what should be included in a poster, how to select fonts and colors, and how to format it so it’s ready to deliver to a client or print if needed.

Some of the things we’ll cover:

• Software options to make your poster, including the best one

• Where to get free PowerPoint templates

• Considerations about various poster specifications

• Selection of colors and fonts for your poster

• How to add images, charts, and graphs to your poster

• The importance of aligning elements and basic principles of appealing design

• How to format your content prior to inserting into the template

• How to deliver the file to your client or print it out for your own use