Poster Perfect

How to drive home your science with a visually pleasing poster

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Conference venues can have less ideal set ups for viewing a poster. Whether it's a hot, congested room filled with people or one that is spacious but contains many hundreds of competing posters, your poster has to pop in any setting.LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY

After many years of walking through poster sessions, Colin Purrington, a professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College, noticed a trend. Usually, as he wandered the aisles looking for something to spark his interest, he’d see a lot of badly designed posters that buried their scientific messages. Although occasionally there would be visually pleasing posters that promoted less-than-stellar science, Purrington usually found that “the attractiveness of a poster is highly correlated with the quality of the science,” he said. Graphic design and scientific inquiry require different skills, but oddly enough, it appeared that “the people who understood the beauty of fonts had a sense of pitching their science,” he said.

Scientists have a lot of good reasons for making bad-looking posters. Mentors often tell students ...

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