Guidelines for Scientific posters

Here are a few guidelines to make an effective poster:

• if possible, make the poster landscape format (much easier to read)

• Start with the figures – it helps to create a good story. Make nice schematics

• Appealing title and short abstracts are important: you  have 5 seconds to determine whether they want to read your poster or not and

• keep the text is below 32pt (else no one will read it - is is the difficult part, condensing the hard work into short sentence)

• good pictures/schematics with self contained captions: you have  30 seconds to explain your work;

• each figure should be referenced in the text

• Data should have proper units and scalebar

Templates

Posters are generally 48" x 36"

You can use Powerpoint, Google slide or Canva (LBL has a Canva for Campus license)

Here is a Google slide template that can be useful : ASPIRES

Abstract

For an effective abstract, you use this template 

Background: What issues led to this work? What is the environment that makes this work interesting or important?

Aim: What did you plan to achieve in this work? What gap is being filled?

Approach: How did you set about achieving your aims (e.g., experimental method, simulation approach, theoretical approach, combinations of these, etc.)? What did you actually do?

Results: What were the main results of the study (including numbers, if appropriate)?

Conclusions: What were your main conclusions? Why are the results important? Where will they lead?

(and... your abstract should not be longer than this template)

Reference, Acknowledgements, Contacts:

Add references where you can – people visiting your poster LOVE to remind you that they've done the same thing 20y ago if you don't put references

Add a link and or a QR code so that people can download your poster

(go.lbl.gov is a cool url shortener, and you can use https://www.qrstuff.com/ to link to it -- make sure to share a pdf/png version)

Examples of posters