Avoiding common mistakes

The number one mistake is to make your poster too long. Densely packed, high word-count posters are basically manuscripts pasted onto a wall, and attract only those viewers who are for some reason excited by manuscripts pasted onto walls.  Posters with 300-500 words are ideal, and lists of points are probably more effective than paragraphs of text.  Even shorter versions can be understandable with good figures and flowcharts.  Don’t be afraid to edit and simplify.  To view your word count in PowerPoint, go to the File menu and select Properties.  For those who feel that their experiment somehow warrants an exception to this brevity advice, find a friend to help you edit, asking them, “What text, figure, or table could I possibly delete or modify?”

Poster 1 is a traditional poster with substantial blocks of text. Although this version has only 740 words of core text (1436 including legends, titles, literature cited, etc.), it still is so dense that most passersby will not take the time to read it.

Poster 2 is much abbreviated from the traditional version with only 337 words of core text (1023 inclusive), but the central ideas are still conveyed. This format is much more inviting for a passerby, allowing a reader to understand the significant conservation implications of the project in less than 5 minutes.

Poster 3 is shorter still with a reduced introduction, methods presented as a flow chart, and results presented only in figures. This version would probably be optimal for a poster session during which the presenter is always available to talk people through the poster. Nevertheless, even with only 209 words of core text (727 words total text) the poster could probably still be understood by a reader viewing the poster alone.

• Format the title in "sentence case" (e.g., "Font abuse in inbred versus outbred populations of Homo sapiens”).
Do not use “title case” (e.g., "Font Abuse in Inbred Versus Outbred Populations of Homo Sapiens") or “all caps” (e.g., "FONT ABUSE IN INBRED VERSUS OUTBRED POPULATIONS OF HOMO SAPIENS"), which both undermine naming conventions that depend on font formatting (e.g., Latin binomials, genes, alleles).  Another reason is that sentences formatted in these ways have been shown (by science!) to require a few extra milliseconds for brains to interpret, and those milliseconds can add up to be annoying.
• Use a non-serif font (e.g., Helvetica) for title and headings and a serif font (e.g., Palatino) for body text (serif-style fonts are much easier to read at smaller font sizes).
• Do not "bullet" or otherwise punctuate section headers.  The use of a larger font size for headers, coupled with a simple “bolded” format, is sufficient for demarcating sections.
• The width of text boxes should be approximately 40 characters (on average: 11 words per line).
• Avoid blocks of text longer than two sentences.
• Whenever possible, use lists of sentences rather than blocks of text.
• Use italics instead of underlining.
• Set line spacing of all text to be exactly 1, in case you have used super- or subscripted text.
• Approximately 8% of males and 0.5% of females have some degree of color-vision deficiency.  You can load an image of your poster onto the internet (as a PDF or JPG) and run it through the free service at VisCheck.com, or you can download their Photoshop plug in that does the same thing. In both cases you will see your poster as color-deficient's see it. In general, avoid using red and green together, and opt to use symbols and patterns instead of colors whenever possible.
• If you are creating images on the computer, note that screen color (RGB mode) is different than printed, mixed-ink mode (CYMK). If you want your image to print as you see it, avoid RGB (i.e., change the mode to CYMK in Photoshop).
• Complete the entire poster on a single platform.  Switching from PC to Mac or Mac to PC invites disaster, sometimes in the form of lost image files or garbled graph axes.  Even if you are lucky enough to transfer content across platforms, switching in this way often creates printing problems in the future.
  Short, informative titles for figures and tables help to lead the viewer more effortlessly through your poster.

Example graph (data from the Gallup Organization)

• If you can add miniature illustrations to any of your graphs (e.g., as above), do it! Visual additions help attract and inform viewers much more effectively than text alone. Tables benefit from this trick as well.
• Most graphing applications automatically give your graph an extremely annoying key that you should quickly delete if you can directly label the different elements (as above). Interpreting keys is sometimes very difficult, and you should do anything in your power to make your graphs easy on the brain.
• Y-axis labels aligned horizontally are much, much easier to read, and should be used whenever space allows.
• All graphs should have axis labels formatted in "sentence case" (not in "Title Case" and not in "ALL CAPS").
  
• Never give your graphs colored backgrounds, grid lines, or boxes.  If your graphing program gives them to you automatically, get rid of them.
  
• Never display two-dimensional data in 3-D.  Three-dimensional graphs look adorable but obscure true difference among bar heights.
  
• Make sure that details on graphs and photographs can be comfortably viewed from two meters away.  A common mistake is to assume that figure axis numbers, labels, figure legend) are somehow exempt from font-size guidelines.  On the contrary, most viewers will read only your figures!
  
• Never, ever incorporate "web" graphics without extreme caution.  Most web images have 72 dots per inch of resolution, but printing at that resolution looks terrible.  If you have access to a digital camera, use it to take your own high quality photographs.  Memory space is cheap on a digital camera, so take dozens of photographs to ensure that at least one has crisp detail, good composition, non-distracting background, etc.  Run your best image through Photoshop to adjust contrast, image size, and sharpening.  It should look professional when printed; if it does not, start over.
  
• If you include a photograph, adding a thin gray or black border will make it more visually appealing.  Just remember not to overpower the image with an overly thick line.

If you include an institutional logo, keep it modest in size, and consider using it in the Acknowledgments only.
Choose matte finishes whenever possible to minimize glare to viewers standing off to the side of your posters at crowded poster sessions.