 All right. Hello. My name is Natalie and I'm with New Mexico EPSCORE and today we're going to talk about conference posters and I'll give you some general presentation tips as well as some tips on how to design your poster. So posters are a really important part of science communication whether it's to the public to students or faculty or people who are in your field of expertise who have been around for a while and also potential funders at certain conferences. Posters should be considered a snapshot of your research and it's communicated clearly while encouraging that you read it to want to learn more. You always want to include funding numbers and logos as well as any images and if you have images you should always include captions. Even if you have to make the text really small, captions are really important and so are credits if you have any pictures on your poster that aren't yours. And a lot of people ask me this all the time. The typical size for a poster is 48 inches by 36 inches and a horizontal horizontally. A lot of people actually have done vertical posters and I'll show you an example of one here in just a minute. But like I said, typically they are horizontal and about that size. Okay, so when we're talking about poster design, a lot of people tend to put not only tables on their poster but also kind of separate the text into boxes. Tables make this sort of especially problematic. It just kind of looks like you're looking at a bunch of boxes and I'll show you an example here in just a second. Graphs and images and figures communicate more effectively than tables do. So the general design rule is if you can try and stay away from tables and represent your data a little bit differently if you can. Tables tend to belong in papers and journals. And then the two rules of two is you should have about two fonts. You know, either a serif and a sans serif kind of like you're seeing on the slide right now. And then you want to do black and white and plus two other colors. You don't want to go crazy with a rainbow poster and you definitely probably don't want to do it all in black and white. So that's just another rule of two, black and white plus two other colors. All right, and here's some general poster tips. I'll explain them as we go along here. You want to make the purpose of your poster clear. You want readers to, do you want your readers to engage in a discussion or maybe express interest in beginning a collaboration? It needs to be really clear right from the get-go. The title is super important. If not the most visible part of your poster, it certainly should be one of them. And it should be akin to a newspaper headline, concise and attention grabbing. You don't want to use all caps and you don't want to use title case for your title. You want to use sentence case. You definitely want to identify and cater to your audience since not all conferences are the same. You're going to probably meet a whole bunch of people who have different expertise in your field. They may not know anything about your field. It could be educators who are trying to find some tips on how to translate your research to younger people, K through 12 educators and stuff. So you want to definitely avoid jargon and make sure that everybody can understand your research. And obviously in order to do that, you have to understand your research. If you want, you can provide abstracts to create simplified content. And that's why we ask for abstracts when you register for events for EPSCORE. It kind of helps you get an idea of what your poster should be communicating in a concise way. All right. And for clarity, you definitely want to make your poster easy to read and not just with regards to the font. But layout and format are almost as important as content. Your poster should guide the eye easily from one step to another. And you'll see what I mean here in just a minute. This includes margins and grids and lots of white space. White space is your friend. You don't want to cram a whole bunch of stuff in there as much information as you can. You want to make sure that you keep your margins clear and don't be afraid of using white space or negative space. There's a good trick you can do to see if your type is big enough to see from far away without actually printing out your poster first. You can print it out on just a eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper and hold it out at arm's length. And if you can read the text on your poster pretty well, it's probably a good size. And that same goes for pictures and graphs. Keep your content concise. Everything on your poster should contribute to your message. Don't overuse text and edit, edit, edit down. Always edit. You know, when you first put your poster together, have somebody take a look at it and read it for you. See if you can bring down the text a little more, replace some text with graphs or, you know, other visual representations. If you're, if it's the first time presenting a poster, you definitely want to be especially ruthless for this. And then give your poster some personality, you know, it doesn't have to be over-the-top personality, but you definitely want to make it stand out, especially if you're at a large conference with tons of posters. You want to attract people from far away, and you also don't want to bore them when they look at it. You want to be able to kind of keep them around and get interested in your research kind of through your poster. All right, so we're going to do some examples. The first step is, this is a template that we made that you're welcome to use. You can find it, I'll give you the website here in just a minute, but you can find it on our website. It's kind of more of a guideline than a fill-in-the-blank sort of thing, but this kind of gives you an idea of what I was talking about. There's no tables on here. There's a few bullets. You don't want to go overboard with the bullets. And there's some advice in these sections too. You can, you know, obviously change the titles and rearrange things. But it's just kind of a general example for what your poster really should look like. And if you see the title, it's in sentence case, not in title case, which is really important. And we have a couple of different fonts and a couple of different colors here. The graph really stands out with the blue on the white background. And then again, as I said, for the pictures, you want to make sure that you have captions even if the captions have to be really small. So here's the website for where you can find actually both templates for both a poster and for PowerPoint presentations, if you'd like. And there's also our logo on the same page. And you can actually, you know, read all the rules for using our logo and any advice that you might need for that. All right, here's our next example. This was created in a program called Latex, which I'll talk about in a little bit. It's actually free. But this is a mathematics poster. So as is typical for this kind of research, there aren't a lot of options for images or to tone down the text. So it's kind of a difficult poster to create that, you know, make it interesting. And the person who did this actually did a really good job. His name is Nathaniel Johnson. And he's using two well-placed focal points, which are the two boxes in blue. And one of them that one of them spans two columns. So you have a four column set up and the one in the middle there spans two columns. And the eye can flow to the different important parts of the poster, which include the two figures that he has there as well. He put some small logos in the corner. It's still pretty hard to read. You know, it's not a great font choice. But, you know, for what he has to work with, I think he did a pretty good job. Four column posters in general tend to be a bit tedious to look at just because they kind of show that you have a lot of text. But again, sometimes can't be avoided with certain research. Here's kind of a typical example. I see a lot of posters like this. It's not a terrible poster. But again, here we have what I was talking about earlier, which is the problem of boxes. You know, you just you have a colored background. And then, you know, in order to be able to read the text, you have to put it on a white background. So you make these boxes and it's just not super interesting. It just doesn't stand out as much as it could. Another problem with this is if you look in especially the middle box, actually the middle box and the ones on the left hand side, the margins are really close to the edge there. And you don't ever want to do that. It makes it really difficult to read. There's a lot of text on this poster. I have a feeling that they probably could have pared it down a little bit, made the font a little bit larger and made it a little bit easier to read as well as fixing the margins. But he's got a nice references box there in the corner, which is fine. One more thing, if you look at the table at the bottom, you have a really interesting example of bad resizing. It looks like the table was probably an image and he stuck it on there and didn't resize it properly. You always want to keep the resolution and the size of your tables and your images to what they were before. Okay. All right, so here's going to be a couple before and afters. This is a before poster. And so we have a problem, we have a few problems with this poster. The margins are really tight. You have this table at the bottom, which is pretty problematic and it's kind of distracting as well as the background gradient is also fairly distracting. And it's hard to read the title. The title's pretty small and they've got it crammed in next to that logo there up at the top. So the person who redid this poster, oops, sorry, here's the after. And what they did was make the logo smaller in the corner, get rid of that background gradient and fix the tables. And it makes a pretty big difference, as you can see. You know, it's still the same amount of information. It's still the same research, obviously, but just giving it a little bit more white space and getting rid of the distracting colors on there has made a big, big difference. All right, so here's a vertical poster. It's got a good use of color, good choice of fonts. It's really different and it will attract attention from far away, even at a big conference. It uses lots of imagery and diagrams, which is great and it has a pretty good title. So what's the problem? Well, let me show you the after here and you can see. So the first poster kind of is really crowded. You don't really know if this is divided into columns or if it's divided into rows. And so by just adding a little bit of white space between the area that says the problem and the area that says the data, and then closing in the margins a little bit more, it kind of makes a big difference and makes it a lot easier to read. Even though, again, this is still the same information. It's the same images. It's just little tiny tweaks that make a big difference and will help your eye flow. Margins are really important. Here's another example. This one's kind of interesting. It's creative. I'm not thrilled with the dark red color in the background but it'll definitely make it stand out. So I understand the choice behind it. It's a good use of flow. It's got kind of an interesting shape in the middle. The font I think is a little small but she in the center section where it's the most important information, she does a great job of using bullets and keeping the text small and using lots of images to kind of help. She's even got a little table there on the side which isn't bad, especially since she has a bunch of other data displayed in different ways. She doesn't have just a whole bunch of tables and she has kind of a call to action there at the bottom which is neat and different. It's risky but I think it pays off and like I said, the dark color can be a problem but she avoids the boxes issue with the way that she lays this out and the way she had kind of a large header background up there. This is one of the more interesting posters I've come across. This is a very, very risky poster. You really, really have to know your material well and not only well but you have to be comfortable speaking about it. This is a great poster for someone who's not in your field who really doesn't understand a lot of the science that goes into your research and they just kind of wanna know what you've been doing and if you have someone who is in your field you're gonna have to basically stand there and explain your research in a much more detailed way because it's just not on your poster. It likely depends on your audience. Like I said, this is a great poster for a conference outside your research field and it encourages the reader to actually interact with the presenter, which is a big deal at a poster conference. It really just comes down to personal preference. This is, like I said, really unusual. It's probably the most unusual poster I've come across but it gets across its message pretty well. All right, so here's some more little tips. There's a few programs you can use. The most popular one, I think, is there at the bottom MS Office. You can either use Publisher or PowerPoint. Pretty much everybody has access to PowerPoint so that's a very, very common program to use. Latex is that one up at the top and was one of the examples I made. It's free and they have templates available. Scribis is a little bit more like Publisher. It's also free to use and I think they have a couple of templates as well. Poster Genius is actually a paid program but they do have a free trial and it's one of those where it really walks you through it so if you really need help, Poster Genius is a good one to try, give their free trial a try. And then the rest of the links there are just some of the sources that I use for this presentation and for other presentations about posters. There's some great examples. The bottom one, perfectly putrid posters is actually from the American Geophysical Union and it's just a funny little article about what to do if you want people to completely ignore your poster at a conference and it's worth taking a look at to know what not to do. All right, here's some general presentation tips. This is for any presentation, whether it's for a poster or for a PowerPoint presentation. You don't wanna chew gum, go easy on the cologne and the perfume, dress nicely. Think, write, design, optimize, present is, are the five tips that I give when I talk about giving presentations and basically it's just a step-by-step way to make sure you're getting your message across in the best way. You think about what you're gonna do and what you want your message to be. You write about it and then you design either your presentation or your poster and then you optimize and optimizing is where you go in and you edit things and then you present. Always face your audience and speak clearly. You can tell a story and you wanna obviously make it clear that you enjoy your research so that your visitor also wants to enjoy your research. Tell a story but don't get off topic. It's really easy for somebody like me to get off topic. And for poster presentation tips, the biggest thing is you definitely wanna practice your elevator speech and or same as a two-sentence rule. Poster visitors are pretty busy people especially if it's a large conference. They have a lot to see and a lot to learn and it can get pretty exhausting. The two-sentence rule is come up with a two-sentence overview of your research before explaining anything else. And if those two sentences are interesting enough, the poster visitor will wanna learn more. And you always wanna thank your visitors and that goes for any presentation anyway. Avoid vagueness and jargon which I've said before and you wanna include some personal interactions so don't turn and read your poster and talk to your poster. You wanna face the people who are there to learn from you and you wanna make sure that you talk to them. All right, and that's it. And I am happy to answer any questions you might have. You can email me and thanks for watching.