What I Learned Designing a Scientific Poster
Scientific communication is an art of which we are born ignorant, requiring intentional practice to develop. It’s certainly a skill into which I have put much attention and still have plenty to learn, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that my presentation at Chirality 2022 won the 2nd Place Poster Award. There was a multitude of excellent science at display at this conference, so I’m really honored and glad that this work was so well received.
Energized at the beginning of presenting!
Where did this poster succeed in communication? As you can see above, it was likely in being concise and approachable. I’m no stranger to the wall-of-text posters in 12pt font (and have certainly given some presentations closer to that side of the spectrum in the past), so one goal here was to show with pictures and figures primarily and only to tell with words when absolutely necessary.
This idea is often provided as critical in presenting, but how to implement this effectively is typically not explained in detail. In part, this due to the fact that any communication should be tailored to the audience at hand, so advice does not always generalize. That said, it may be helpful to explain what the audience and goals were for this presentation in particular.
Returning to the idea of being succinct, this paper only had words besides captions in the form of a single summarizing sentence and a smattering of bullet points in the background and discussion. These sections began as the standard paragraphs, but it was quickly determined that this did not read at distance. Indeed, the points got distilled so much that the font size chosen was still fully legible when a version of this poster was printed on standard letter (8.5 by 11 in.) paper! I had some concern that this would come off as being overly terse and perhaps even amateurish (did I not have more to talk about?), but in actuality this was far from the general perception.
Of course, this makes sense when you take the perspective of the general reader, who has plenty of demands on their time and attention. Presentation that provides the most useful information while being the least energetically taxing is generally appreciated, not judged for being unthorough (that is, after all, what the paper is for).
Keeping in mind the audience, which was mostly experimental chemists, I made sure to only put the three most central equations from the work on display. This was a theoretical scientific presentation, but even still, less is more!
Getting attention at the top
One design tool that I found especially helpful was the graphical summary, shown above. To get a tractable conclusion, a passerby only had to read one sentence and glance at a diagram, which is a pretty easy ask. There has been a recent push towards this sort of design (e.g. as part of the so-called “#betterposters”), and while the extremes of a poster where 2/3 is just whitespace and a QR code is perhaps excessive, I think there’s something to learn from the general ethos. On that note, the idea of putting a QR Code that links to the associated paper was a good idea—I saw a number of people taking the opportunity to scan it in order to see the scientific results in more detail.
For figures, I found the book Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte to be particularly helpful. This is an excellent text on how to display data, and I implemented some of its lessons in this poster. One design pattern that Tufte considers particularly effective is the idea of including figures in “small multiples” where similar images are displayed for contrast. You can see this idea at display in the graphical abstract with the two orientations of arrows, where we show how circularly-polarized light is absorbed differently depending on light propagation direction. This motif is repeated in another figure, where we show
which alters the initial images with the induction of labelling of phenomena and a pitch angle.
Overall, going to Chirality 2022 was a highly productive endeavor made even more so through a simple yet robust poster design.
