 warmly welcome to the class on communicating science. My idea with the next 45 minutes is gonna try to share some tricks, tips, thoughts, ideas about how to improve your storytelling, particular for posters and poster pitches, but maybe more so in general when you communicate and live science, the universe and the future careers. So nothing in science really is an idea until you've shared this idea with other people. I might have the world's greatest results lying on my hard drive or in a notebook in the lab, but unless somebody else knows about it, 10 years from now on, somebody will have thrown away that notebook or hard drive and that knowledge will in effect cease to exist if nobody else knows about it. So communication is not really an afterthought but part of the scientific process and I want you to enjoy this part of the scientific process. Now, you're likely gonna enjoy this more if you're efficient at it and to be efficient communication, we need to understand a couple of rules or thoughts about it. And the first one is that every communication activity has a goal, an objective, something you want to achieve with it. Now that might be for a pitch that you want people to come to your poster. When you're designing the actual poster, it might be to grab the audience's attention and when you're standing and presenting the poster, it might be a third objective that you would like to make a contact so that you can get a future postdoc or something. Same thing for an oral talk or if you're pitching something to a major foundation in order to get a research grant. Be aware of your goal and tailor your communication to reach that goal. Now the first part to tailor it to is the audience. There is a difference if you're describing something to say 10 year olds or undergraduate students or professors in the Royal Academy of Sciences. It doesn't necessarily mean that you'd make a more advanced presentation but depending on the background of your audience you would likely prefer to either leave somethings out or include other things. As part of this you should have a strategy for your entire communication. It's your idea to make them appreciate you, make them more aware of your research. It's the idea that you would like to make them more aware of the field, Stockholm University or something else. Maybe you want to seduce them into doing an undergraduate education program in your particular area. There are some tactics and activities to improve this that we're going to go through. When it comes to evaluations, you can certainly use outstanding communication as a way to improve your evaluations, say for a research proposal. And in general, any type you're preparing a budget, materials, timetables, task lists, these are communication activities and you should think about how you convey this and what your goal of the communication is. And what all this boils down to is that communication has a purpose and before you even start to think about how to design your communication you yourself need to be aware of what is my purpose of this particular communication that I'm going to be delivered today and what are the things they're going to tailor this for. Now mind you, time is short, every single communication item is not going to be perfect but try to think of one or two things at least where you adapt your communication to your intended audience. And one of the first parts of this has to do that you have an expertise or background that might range from low to high and your audience might not necessarily have an expertise but depending on what you communicate to them they will understand less or more of what you communicate. Already during your poster pitches I think that many of you realize that your pitches are quite specialized. You might not have thought about this for your own pitch but everyone else's pitches was likely difficult to understand. The challenge here is that all you are experts in what you're presenting about and you might not put yourself at the right most part of the spectrum but trust me, compared to the general audience you are stratospherically high here. Just because there are a handful of people in the world who might know more about it that doesn't mean that you're any further to the left here. So you definitely run the risk of being too much of an expert and have too much details mean that you instantly fall down in the red part of the spectrum. That whatever you're saying is correct but you're condensing too much information in too little space so your audience fails to grab it. Now, if you instead manage to condense this down focus on the core aspects, take a step back leave out some details. You can move up from the red part into the green part, the blueprint here. And whether that is undergraduate students wanting to take say the educational program you're pushing or it's a board evaluating your research proposal or it's colleagues being interested in your poster. If you make sure that you keep the details in a level that's low enough that they actually understand you will have a much clearer call to action and they will be aware of what the purpose of your communication was and hopefully they've gotten the idea. For communication in general, your luck here is actually that you have high expertise but in general in the world there's quite a lot of communication happening from people with lower expertise. It happens all the time in media and social media and there too you can fall down on the left side of the spectrum be ranging either from bullshit or trivial communication that bumper sticker. And here you have an advantage. As scientists, people in general have a lot of credibility in your expertise so use that wisely to your advantage. Communication is more fun than you think. And while you might be nervous when you're designing your poster pictures think of these five, six year olds they have found a stick or a new stone they love telling stories and we're born to tell stories whether that's around a campfire or in kindergarten. And somehow what's happened to all of us over the last 20 years, well 40 years in my case is that we've forgotten how fun it is just to tell people what you were exploring or if you fell in a puddle or something. And if there's one mind, mental image I want you to maintain from this class it's really this one. Imagine that you are these five year olds you all went into science because you love science and when you're standing there and describing your poster the mental picture you should have is that you are these five year old telling all the other colleagues at the conference about these amazing sticks you found in your research because they too love research and they want to see your stick. And if you manage to capture this attention I think you will get over a whole lot of this nervosity and instead focus on all the amazing science you have to share. If you do that people are gonna care less about what you stutter or if you forget to mention something or if some of your plots are not ideal because you're ideally conveying your enthusiasm for your work, right? Now, having said that, once you go up there and stand and talk in front of the audience it's scary. We've all been there at the podium and whether it's 50, 500, or a thousand people in the room, this can't be nervous. It was nervous for me too in the beginning. So how do you handle this? Well, there are a couple of ways of doing it. Right now in this recording you might perceive that I'm looking right into your eyes. I'm not. I'm looking straight into a camera lens. And this is hard, but you can fake it, right? I'm faking that I'm looking into your eyes you personally being my intended audience. If I instead were to look at my slide it would look something like this or I would look at some sort of written notes I have right next to my computer. And if I was sitting like this for the next 20 minutes you would likely not perceive that I was as engaged in you, right? This works equally well in a large lecture auditorium. If I have 20 people in front of me I might look at somebody else in the audience and you see that I don't wave my attention all over the room but I'm spending maybe 10 seconds looking somebody in the eyes and then I look somebody else in the eye right next to you. And you will always perceive that I keep going in this communication and I rest my eyes a few seconds at different people in the audience but I don't let my eyes wander all over the audience. Actors are great at this. They do this if there's 5,000 people in a dark room and of course they can't look at those 5,000 people but just I look into a lens now they just take their view and fix their attention of one arbitrary spot in the room and then they move that to another arbitrary spot 10 seconds later. So do play around with this because we're very human and feeling this personal interconnection really helps. Second, I'll let you into the little secret. I too can be, I wouldn't say nervous but I'm still a little bit tense before I give a talk now even 30 years later. That is not bad. That's good. At least for me. This helps me focus my attention maybe replace one or two slides. Was there something fun in the media yesterday that I can include in my talk and really make sure that I am 100% focused I feel energized and when I actually walk up on stage and tap the microphone at least for me nowadays then the nervosity just fades away that I'm enjoying the moment and I love standing in this limelight and in particular if you feel nervous about it take every single chance you can to practice this because practice makes perfect and you will get better at this. Then there are a couple of things that you should and should not do. For instance, emotions. And emotions are conveyed with 20 facial expressions you can probably see that in my face, right? We put much more energy and words selecting and conveying a message while in reality 50% of the words don't matter if your expressions were not aligning with your words. Hearing is also slower than human brain's ability to think. We listen to only 100 to 125 words per minute while thinking and the brain composes up to 300 words per minute. You probably saw what happened here, right? There are two things. First, anybody reading whether it's from my notebook or from the slides is boring as H-E-L-L. It removes all those motions is removed all the emotional connectivity. Don't do this. Second, while I was reading from my notes, what were you doing? Well, I bet that half of you were reading these bullet points too, right? And the whole point, this is the main reason you should not have lots of text on slides because most audiences are not stupid. If I get presented with a bunch of text, what do I do? Well, I start reading it. And unfortunately, we're not particularly good at handling things simultaneously. So when I read the bullet points on your slides, what is that I do not do? I don't listen to you. So what the speaker, me in this case, have suddenly achieved is that I managed to instruct the audience not to listen to me, but read my bullet points instead. Instead, I would strongly recommend that you do the exact opposite. Completely wipe away all the text from your slides and create slides that consist entirely of images. Don't use your university logo type on every slide. Don't use all these fancy keynotes or PowerPoint slide templates where two thirds of the slides are filled out with general graphics for your university or so, but let pictures expand the entire slide. Now, this can be dangerous because your audience don't know what to resturize them, right? So that you will need to know how to entertain them and you will speak. But the point is that whether you like it or not, that's what you have to do. You are the presentation. The slides are just the supporting backup materials. So dare to be this presentation. Now, when you are the presentation, this also means that you are the center of attention, but you are the center of attention whether you like it or not. That also means that you need to think a little bit about how you melt in. Now, you're fairly lucky. You're Europeans and most of you go to conferences either in Europe, pure scientific conferences, or the US. Nobody's going to care how you're addressed within reason. But that is not universally true. If you're a senior professor and you go to a conference in Japan, you would likely be expected to wear a suit. Otherwise, the other professors would like to take you for a post-doc. Second, if you're pitching a presentation, say to the European Commission or a major grant agency in Europe, then you would likely also be expected to wear a suit. So there are a whole lot of cases where everyone else in the group might be significantly better dressed than you. And then you will likely feel a bit awkward if you come up dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. And conversely, of course, if everyone else is dressed in shorts and t-shirts, you're going to feel quite awkward wearing a tie. So adapt a little bit to the audience. It's perfectly fine to stand out if you know why you're standing out and if you want to stand out. But if that is not your desired effect, you likely want to make sure that you're dressed and behave roughly like the rest of the audience. And as I also mentioned, eye contact, eye contact, eye contact. Messaging and communicating science is much more about emotional connections than you think. So it's primarily the people in the room that matter. They are 10 times more important than your slides. Now, having said that, the reason we have this talk is that we're going to learn to design posters and communication in general. And that starts with designing titles. So why do we have to design titles? Well, that title is the first few seconds I look at before I decide that I'm going to continue to the next poster or the next press release or something else. If I like your title, I might spend another few seconds or introduction or abstract, depending on what the communication format is. And I'm basically just looking for an excuse to continue to the next 499 out of 500 posters in the audience. So use these words wisely. This is a random student, a picture that I stole online and her title here is identification and characterization of an E. Coli, bacteria phage, mutant capable of growing on a non permissive host. This is quite a little K title actually. She's focused on what she's achieved. She has a model organism there and she has a couple of her results in it. Possibly the thing that you could improve, you could make it a bit more catchy or so that you'd remember it, but it's not entirely easy to come up with such titles. So what should you think about when you formulate titles? Well, if you're doing a press release or something, you might wanna focus on something that a journalist might be interested in writing a full page spread on. This is like testing a drug against brittle bones that that might have effect on COVID-19. You could spice up this title too. The whole point is that if your title doesn't really stand out from the crowd, it should be a bit surprising or strange, fun. There is a fairly large risk that the audience will just continue to the next poster because they're tired and they don't have a hold of the time available and that coffee is really tempting. So this is super hard, identifying good titles but it will pay off. A good title means that they will spend more time on the things you wanna tell them. This is equally true if you're pitching to a venture capital firm and this might sound horrible. Why am I saying this and they talk about scientific communication? Well, in one way it's not that different. Of course, we don't talk about dollars or money and there is less money in science but ultimately the thing in common here is that we are asking for resources and whether that resource is somebody's time, it could be a grant. All of us have done a PhD at some point many of you are still doing it, right? And that's because somebody secured say four million Swedish corner for your project so that you could do a PhD. All this is about competition for resources and when you wanna pitch a poster to somebody you're asking for five or 10 minutes of somebody's time likely a person who's very busy. So why should they spend this time or resources or indirectly money with you if it's about the PhD project? Of course, you're probably adding six zeros when it comes to about pitching to venture capital but ultimately you need to convey somebody the message why is it better for them to spend this time on your poster than the competition or your colleagues' poster. So this starts with the title and these titles have to be impactful and you need the right keywords. So what are good keywords? Well, you likely wanna tell them quickly what was the main results? What will they learn from your poster? Is there some take home message? Was there any particular technique and a target say E. coli if that's relevant to you? Something that's unexpected. Basically, why should I even bother reading your poster or reading your full introduction or abstract? If everything in your poster is stuff that sounds kind of obvious that I expected, well, if this is already what I expected, why should I spend more time on something I expected? It's hard to cramp all these things into a short title, right? Well, there are a couple of tricks. Pitches and these abstracts are roughly the same but not quite identical. Your pitch is that might be the 30 seconds we have in a large session where we let each student pitch 30 seconds why the audience should come and listen to their poster. The abstract is a bit more dry. The abstract is usually something that we ask you to submit well ahead of the conference so that we can print 5,000 abstract in an abstract book so that everyone at the conference can search among the abstract and decide what posters they wanna come to. In theory, you could print your abstract on the top left most corner in your poster but you usually don't have to. And I would say by the time I come to your poster I've already decided that I wanna look at your poster and then you likely want something slightly sexier inviting rather than having a bunch of 250 words that you ask me to read. The abstract though, it is the first part of the storytelling. There is a famous quote or story attributed to Ernst Hemingway when somebody asked him if he could write the shortest story he could write to bring somebody's eyes to tears and then he messaged that it would be six words and the story is a classical one that for sale, baby shoes never worn. I don't expect that our scientific stories are gonna be quite as short as that, right? But you see, bring down your story to the bare essence. Let them fill in the gaps themselves. And if you have a super cool abstract like that, the shorter the better, they will kind of fill in the spaces themselves and they will decide that this sounds really cool. I need to learn more about this. You don't need to tell them the entire answer, but the second they've decided they wanna learn more about this, what are they gonna do? Well, they're likely gonna come to your poster and that was the intended outcome. Press releases are actually great examples of this, although we're not gonna focus on them today. You need the full story in one line and that could be the title or the introduction. And in press releases, it's famous that we usually ask you to answer the question who, why, what, when, where and how. As a journalist, that's what you're interested in if you're gonna write a paper. Then you quickly need to get to the point, the context. You need some details, you need some credibility. You have the credibility for free. You're the people in white lab coats, scientists. But you need to have enough of significance to make this slightly more credible, not just the cool single line story, but what is the actual contents here? A little bit of background info, maybe quotes. Again, it gives you the human emotional touch. Add life to the story and then boom, the results. And then finish off with a call to action. And this call to action could be, so if you're interested in my learning more about this, come visit my poster this afternoon at 3 p.m. in board 743 or contact me at this particular email or something. Make it easy for the reader. Know what they should do to follow up if they're interested in listening to more of your story, for example. So that brings us to the actual posters, right? Now you have the audience. They're interested in learning more. And there are a couple of do's and don'ts here. Rather, I would say there are a couple of different do's. There is not one universal truth, but there are a couple of different common formats that we're gonna tell you a little bit more about so that if you're aware. Does this mean that you can't follow any other format? Of course not. You can in principle design almost any poster you want, but this is kind of like literature, language, or anything else or standing in the lab for that matter. First, you need to learn the rules. You need to understand the rules. You need to understand why we use these rules. Once you've understood that, you can choose to deliberately break one or maybe two rules. Breaking all of them is virtually never a good idea because if you're purposefully breaking one rule to make your posters stand out, that's great. But if you're ignorantly violating half of them, you're likely not gonna achieve the communication outcome that you hoped for. So a couple of these tricks. Never underestimate the importance of having a simple message. Occasionally you might feel that we're arguing to dump things down or so. I don't think this is dumping down. I could probably give a talk about almost anything we do in my lab for 60 minutes instantly. But that is during 60 minutes, right I'm doing now. I can afford to move off on a tangent. I can make a comment about something else. It doesn't matter if I lose a minute or two because I can regain that minute later. Now conveying a message in five minutes on the other hand, that is complicated because in five minutes I need to focus on the bare essence. I do not have time for extensive backgrounds or so. So it's not so much as dumping down but learning to focus on the core message and avoiding the need for 10 minutes of background. That is by the hardest way of communicating science but it's also the most impactful one. So making it easy to understand is not dumping down. It requires a mastermind of communication to imagine teaching a 12 year old the essence of say quantum mechanics in a way that you actually will understand a little bit on it. There is nothing stupid with that. That requires a mastermind communicator. So now you are there. Why do we want to do this? Well, you want some sort of result you want them to learn in the poster design. The easiest way for them to stop at your posters there's something that's surprising, unexpected, cool, creative, stunning, right? Remember, there are 5,000 posters. There might be 499 more in this session. Why should they spend more time in your poster or at least why should they remember your poster when they don't remember the other 499 ones? One good way at a quite technical conference could, for instance, be that is there something very concrete in your results that the audience can use? That doesn't necessarily translate to the most striking pictures but if there's something they can use they will likely remember your poster. It might be particular techniques or target system. The sky is the limit here. You decide what impact you want to achieve with your poster, then you decide your communication goal and then just go after it, design everything to reach that communication goal. And think of this, why should they like your poster best in this particular session which might be a super advanced session on content mechanics and in that case all the other posters will likely also be quite advanced. Who, what, when, where, why? The same thing as press releases. I would argue this is equally true for posters. Maybe when and where are not quite as important because when it's like, you're likely presenting things that are quite up to date. Where? Well, the university would likely say in the poster logotype so you don't have to repeat that to them but you are of course indirectly communicating them. And how might be a little bit more important in posters because there is enough room to expand on the techniques but it's pretty much exactly the same questions as you're aiming for in a great press release. Now, you need to get to the point because when you're standing by the poster or in your pitch you have tens of seconds before the reader loses interest. And that is hard because in general you would likely need half an hour just to give them the background. And I'm sorry, you do not have that half hour. You need to decide what you can cut away so that in 50, 60 seconds what background can you tell them so that you can then jump straight to your results. At that point they might say that they're super interested in this and I have some questions there about panel three. Then you can expand. But don't steal the time assuming that you have five minutes of their attention because in general you don't. And then you're standing there and presenting this. And hopefully you're gonna be have more fun. You will have a reason why you're presenting this. You're hopefully gonna have five people around your poster because everyone likes it. You're giving a short sweet presentation while that other poor person who might have had much better research results they haven't prepared this as much. And consequently they're gonna be very few people standing in front of their poster that it's just full of text and intense graphs. So the communication matters occasionally more than the actual scientific results. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't aim for great scientific results of course but great science does not sell itself. You have to convey just how great it is. There are a couple of tricks here that you can use. One book that I frequently buy in my group and share with students is made to stick by Chip and Dan Heath. And this is a bit corny, it's American but it's still quite useful. They talk about six principle of great communication. The first thing is that your messages need to be simple. Say that every year 10 times more people are killed by deer than sharks in the United States. Simple, anybody can understand it. It's also a bit unexpected, right? It makes you react. And this is a great start. You want it to be concrete, not the whole lot of the complicated things that our scientists like. Concrete makes it, if it's easy, simple, concrete, you've got me hooked. This is something that I want to understand more. Credible, well, there's a lot of uncredible communication in particular in social media, just imagine COVID-19. You have an advantage here as scientists, you wear the white lab coats, you are credible by design. So you usually get a pass on this one. But don't forget that they should also be emotional. And here scientists are frequently lousy. Remember those four-year-olds talking about their sticks? They are great at the emotion and dare to convey your passion for science. The more emotion you show, the more people will likely appreciate your passion for the science and thus your results. And at the end of the day, this is about telling a story just like the five-year-olds do. You are the heroes in your stories, you decide what the story is gonna be about, but pits this as a story with a fun introduction and ideally some really cool and people will remember the story. And that's not really fundamentally different from sitting around that campfire. Now the way to remember this, this is an American book and you have this abbreviation here, success. Simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories. It's a great basis for communication in general, whether you're pitching for your 100 million venture capital firm or for people to come to your posture. The second part I'm gonna talk here is a little bit about visual design in particular for posters. And the general recommendation there is that show people, don't tell them. This is a poster that I did in 20 minutes on a flight many years ago and I show it because it's not a great example. Well, I do one great thing here. I have a striking image right in the middle of the poster but overall there is far too much text here and I copied a little bit of this from a paper. Do not do this. The first thing when it comes to the titles, never use more than two lines for a title and if you run out of space here, most word processor programs have so-called condensed fonts that are slightly narrower and that allow you to fit more space. Don't forget to add your names and affiliation. In principle, you just need the name of the university then the email so they can contact you. They're not gonna write you a physical letter but I have seen posters where people forget this and then it's a bit sad that they don't know who wrote the poster. The prime real estate of your poster is the part in the middle. Here you want something striking that summarizes your research that you can point the audience to when you speak. So spend time on this one. You likely want a few logos, not the same one but all your affiliations here. Whether you wanna use the same format as the rest of your group to stress that you're belonging to a group or whether you wanna stand out from the crowd, that's up to you. But remember, decide what your purpose is and then design your poster to fit your purpose. Occasionally I've actually seen students put their photos on the poster which can be quite a good idea. If there are 10 people standing in front of this poster and there are lots of authors on the list I have no idea who the presenter is but in this case you're gonna see who the presenter of this particular poster is. And then we just fill this in. Don't, I would err on the side of not putting a 250 words of abstract text here but a few bullet points. What is the main take home message, the background they need to know? You might, I usually don't go through the background but in case the audience has questions I wanna be able to answer them and that's great to have some images that I can point them to. But remember, I usually don't explain that. And then I have the one or two results here that I wanna stress, that I wanna point them to. I might have a third figure and I need to be able to go through all this in 60 or 120 seconds. So I don't really have room for more than three, four plots. Then I need the take home message compared that to the call to action in the press releases you want one clear take home message ideally. Maybe two points, but by the time you start having three or four points people will not remember what you were telling them anymore. More information, next steps by all means add it down there but posters are not like a written paper where it's important to have a long reference list or all the acknowledgments. The likelihood that the chair of the research foundation paying for your work is there is almost nil. So you're doing the poster for the audience reading it. So focus on making this a great aid in your oral presentation to them. You can use a QR code for instance if you want them to find more information. As you might have seen in some of the background information that I shared with you there is another alternative format of designing posters. It's called better poster format. I'm not sure if it's better, but it's different and it's worth playing with if you're interested. The idea here is to use this prime real estate on a plain language, plain English, translation of your results and emphasize the important words so that people remember that and then dare to use empty space. And then you have all the gory details in the left and right here. By all means experiment with this. I don't think it is better. You can play around with them. You can even combine them as I will see. The only thing that matters here is what format are you happy with when it comes to sharing your work. Play around with it, experience, make sure that you have presented a poster in each format at some conference or so and eventually you will likely convert to a format that you are most happy with. The one thing that you should not do is formats like this. Walls of text entirely without any graphics to rest your eyes on because people will literally try to skip your poster. They don't want to spend 20 minutes going through this. While a poster like this, 10 seconds after seeing it you will know what to take home messages. And if you're interested in this research you will quite likely stop and ask more about the work here. And do you see there on the right she has all the gory data if somebody is interested in the details but she's likely not gonna take you through that if you only have 60 seconds to talk to her. But you don't have to pick sites. You can take the good parts of the new formats, keep the useful aspects of the old introduction, methods result, you see, this works quite well too. The sky is the limit here. The only thing I would advise you don't change too much because most readers expect you see a title at the top. They expect you see your name. They expect to see a university logo. I expect it to be some introduction somewhere. I expect to see methods. I expect to see results somewhere in the middle. And I expect to see the main take home message down on the lower right. If you start diverging too far from that you're gonna confuse me. And if you confuse me I'm likely not gonna get your intended take home message and that's bad because then you lose. And these are other beautiful examples of posters. They don't have to be those boring slides with like one panel each. Nobody was ever punished for having colored some poster. Dare to use color, dare to play around, dare to have visually striking illustrations and dare to use, you can even use playful fonts as you see here on the left. Now mind you, do that within reason two. The best posters are usually 70% in for graphics but you need 30% scientific paper. You shouldn't do 80% scientific paper but if you start doing 90% infographics then you're dumping it down a little bit too much. So there will of course be some readers who do want the gory details. So a few hard results have to be there. Otherwise you risk falling into the bullshit territory of that communication quadrant. But you can go overboard. Do not use red, green color combinations for instance. Why not? Well, 7% of males have this deficiency because males only have one X chromosome and chromosome 23. It's less common among females but even among the female population there's roughly 1% that are colorblind. That is hopefully not the professor that you wanna do your post of it but you never know. So don't, well avoid using red, green combinations. There are other combinations that are technically don't fall in the colorblind territory but you'll likely wanna avoid them if the audience get a headache from looking at your poster they will likely go on to the next one. You can use colors in many ways though. Here you see how that we can use color to draw your attention to a particular curve and be aware that you might unintentionally be doing this by mistakes. Most of us tend to focus on colors and curves that are bright and colorful, for instance bright red, my sorry. While dark or dull colors, dark green are likely the ones that we're gonna care less about. But if you by mistake make your most important curve, dark green, I will likely look at the bright red curve assuming that the bright red curve is gonna be most important and then you're unintentionally drawing my attention away from your key data. There is more than one way to skin this cat and there's more than one way to design a poster. If you want to, you can use PowerPoint. I'm a Mac convict so I kind of prefer keynotes. Both of these programs work fine. The one thing you need to be aware of is that they're bit mapped. So if you're designing this with a normal slide, they might just have 1024 bytes in 68 pixels and that's far too little if you're gonna print this in poster format. So in that case you need to start with going to the page setup or something and really tell the program that this is gonna be a zero format and make sure that you have much higher resolution. I also would like doing my posters in pages on X if I don't have any other alternative. It comes between with Macs and it's free and this too can definitely render very high quality posters. If you are on Macs in general, I would say Apple has slightly better typographic and graphical taste than Microsoft so Apple programs are usually quite good for this. If you wanna splash out financially, Adobe has great programs. If you're more on a budget or if you're at Stockholm University, we have great site license deals on the affinity programs, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo and they're just a few tens of dollars each. I can really recommend them. They're almost as good as Adobe once and much much cheaper. And then you're there at the big day of the conference. You're standing in front of the conference and that big headshot comes by and you really would like to present your poster. And this is where it's important to dare to speak to people too. Many of us, we might just stand there and hoping that they will contact you spontaneously but they might not. This big shot on the left, he might be on his way to a coffee break or something and he's just glancing by your poster and you might recognize him or her. If you're just standing there looking down at my shoes or something or talking to my fellow student or something, they might very well not stop by at all in particular if I'm not looking at them this way, right? If I instead look at you when I see you looking at my title, what I say, hi, would you want to take me through it? That is kind of an invitation, right? The problem is that the audience might still be thinking they only have 15 minutes for coffee. They're stressed out. So the key thing, don't just say that you're gonna take them through the poster. Say, should I take you through it in 60 seconds or two minutes? Because this really stresses that you're aware that their time is short. You prepared a really short pitch and they know that, well, they have 15 minutes but if you just take two of those minutes they will still have 13 minutes for coffee and they will likely spend that on you if you're a little bit interested in the poster. But if I suspect that this is a wall of text and it's gonna take you 20 minutes, I will likely find an excuse to move on to the next poster. So everything from your poster pitch to the design of your poster, to how you deliver this, to remember this call to action at the very end of the poster, this creates an opportunity to you to follow up with this audience, whether it's a peer student or a senior professor or somebody from a grant agency. Everything is part of your communication pipeline. And with that, I think I've taken you through the ideas that I would like to share with you. Time is short and this is the end of my time for this talk and normally I would have had questions and reflections here. I'm not able to take questions interactively. Feel free to send me a mail if you have them. Otherwise, I would strongly recommend reflection. Reflection is one of the most powerful things we have but we rarely do it intentionally. So for instance, when you deliver the pitch the first time, reflect back, what was good with this? What could have been improved? Is there anything in particular that say some other student gave that, oh, I would have liked if I did that? Well, steal that. You can steal the research results but you can definitely steal their formats. Remember, lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. Same thing when you design a poster. Maybe it was not such a great idea to make whole background green and the text red. Make note of that. Mistakes are bad but mistakes happen but make sure you don't do the same mistake twice. You can use the purple and blue combination next time but the third time you will hopefully not do that but a better contrast. Same thing with how you presented your poster at the conference. Once you go home after the conference, was there anything you were happy with? Anything that you could have done better? Did you notice patterns among the other students the posters where there were lots of people talking? Is there anything particular with those posters? I would almost bet that there is relatively little correlation with how great the science was and the most important factor is usually they have designed the poster that invited question and that invited bi-directional communication while many of our posters including mine occasionally are more that they are stating results and if they're just stating results it's difficult for the audience to engage. And we are going to have a great time together in about two weeks when we get a chance to practice this part two when we're going to look at all your posters. So with that I'd like to thank you very much for your attention and good luck with the poster design.