Better Posters: Plan, Design and Present an Academic Poster

300 Pages·2021·12.09 MB·english

by  Zen Faulkes

Better Posters
The author in his natural habitat: presenting a poster at a conference.
Better Posters
Plan, Design, and Present
a Better Academic Poster
ZEN FAULKES
PELAGIC PUBLISHING
Published by Pelagic Publishing
PO Box 874
Exeter
EX3 9BR
UK
www.pelagicpublishing.com
Better Posters: Plan, Design, and Present a Better Academic Poster
ISBN 978-1-78427-235-7 Paperback
ISBN 978-1-78427-236-4 ePub
ISBN 978-1-78427-237-1 PDF
© Zen Faulkes 2021
Foreword © Echo Rivera 2021
All images and figures are © the author unless otherwise indicated
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Apart from short excerpts for use in
research or for reviews, no part of this document may be
printed or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans-
mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, now known or hereafter invented or
otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
This manuscript was written in Microsoft Word (www.office.com).
Figures were made using Origin (www.originlab.com), CorelDRAW,
and Corel Photo-Paint (corel.com). The “hand-lettered” typeface used
in many figures is Unmasked from Blambot Studios (blambot.com).
For my family: my wife Sakshi, my pack Max,
my father Kevin and my mother Karren

Contents
Foreword by Echo Rivera ix
Preface xii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1

1. Poster design: the short form 3
Part I For viewers
2. Attending a poster session 9
Part II For presenters
3. Why posters? 17
4. Design thinking 23
5. Early preparation 39
6. Narrative thinking 55
7. Visual thinking and graphic design 64
8. Figures 82
9. Presenting data 92
10. Colors 121
11. Beyond paper 133
12. Text and type 142
13. Layout 157
14. Grids 160
15. Background 177
16. Title bars 179
17. Blocks of text 188
18. Sections 201
19. Images and graphics, revisited 210
20. Fine-tuning 215
21. Before you print 221
22. Printing 226
23. Travel 232
24. Networking and presentation 234
25. After the conference 248
Part III For organizers
26. Poster session planning 259
27. Conference website resources 266
28. During the conference 269
Part IV What next?
29. Constant improvement 273

Afterword 276
References 278
Index 294
viii
Foreword
If you’re like most academics, you have not received formal training
in verbal or visual communication skills. So, it’s not all that surprising
we frequently commiserate about jargon-filled wall-of-text conference
posters and #DeathByPowerPoint presentations.
It seems that most (if not all) of us know there is a problem with how
academia communicates their research and educational material. Luckily,
there is a group of folks dedicated to fixing this problem and helping
academics more effectively communicate their work. Zen Faulkes (or,
as he is also known on Twitter, Doctor Zen) is one such person that has
been helping academics create more engaging and effective conference
posters for years. It’s why I am so excited for Doctor Zen’s book on poster
design and was happy to write this foreword for this book.
I train educators (e.g., academics, scientists, researchers, evaluators) to
create visually engaging and effective slide presentations. In other words,
my focus area is on ending #DeathByPowerPoint. There is, however, a
lot of overlap between visual presentations and conference posters, and
almost all the people I work with create both posters and presentations.
So, I keep an eye out for poster design resources that I can share. Doctor
Zen’s poster design website was one that I often shared with others.
I published my first blog post about posters because I kept getting
requests for templates, and even saw conferences starting to recommend
or require templates. As a presentation designer and trainer, the number
one biggest struggle for me is convincing people that a slide template will
not solve their problems. I’ve lost count of the number of times folks have
asked me to design a template for them, in hopes that this template will
make their presentations visually engaging from that point on. It’s taken
years of educational work to explain to folks that #DeathByPowerPoint
is caused by something much deeper than the wrong template. The last
thing I wanted was for the idea of a template to become expected (or even
more expected) in the poster design field, too.
The blog post I wrote about why templates aren’t the solution for
posters (or presentations) caught Doctor Zen’s attention – that’s how we
ix