Effective poster design for science communication

Guidelines to get you started and keep you going

There are no shortcuts—good explanations take effort. There are plenty of gimmicks and cheap tricks that masquerade as solutions—reject them.

Instead, seek out strategies that adopt the categorical imperative. If everyone used this strategy, would the (poster) world be a better place? A conference hall full of 300 QR-code posters? No thank you.

The poster design guidelines are flexible. They are built on the concept that less is more. However, sometimes a little bit more is actually more. Think before you draw and adjust the design to the themes of your story.

See how the guidelines can be applied to posters in the wild by visiting the poster hospital.

A poster is your first opportunity to organize and communicate your reasearch to members outside of your lab. It will help you to practise telling and “drawing” your science story and its design should be based on its concepts, themes and transitions.

The poster is a prop—not a paper. In most settings, you will be there to present it. Match its content to the story you will tell.

Most posters are bad not because they are ugly (they are) but because they fail to present concisely what was done and, more importantly, why it was done.

Most posters have too much content, presented too flatly. Less is more: get to the point, then stop.

Motivate why the work was done. What is the cost of not doing it?

State your hypothesis and conclusions clearly and early. Connect them with the fewest steps required for a first explanation.

The reader won’t know what is important, so tell them.

Saliently and intuitively code key contrasts (e.g. healthy/disease, wildtype/mutant).

Good explanations are ones conveniently placed. Embed simple diagrams next to relevant text.

Clean and consistent design allows for subtle cues to call out important observations and other points of interest.

Clip art, pie charts, bullet points, boxes around text, background fills, textures and gradients. Only you can stop it.

Create groups to encode real-world relationships and be on the lookout for unintended accidental groupings.

Alignment of similar quantities subtly suggests where to look next.

Create alignment guides and use them consistently—the eye will find even small misalignments.

Do not let a template bully you into using a specific column width. Change proportions to suit content.

Be prepared to rewrite. There are many ways to say something and some ways are easier to typeset.

Space makes groups.

Dividing lines can be effective but more can make the poster look congested.

Hollow boxes are jails and do not distinguish foreground from background.

Don’t say everything you know. Your most valuable resource is the reader’s time.

Regions of unbalanced negative space are good candidates for annotations, credits, quotes, and other garnish that adds value to the poster. Don’t overdo it—most quotes rehash old tropes. If you must, find something that is passionate and slightly mysterious.

Sans-serif is clearer than serif at small sizes and suitable for modest amounts of copy.

Match Helvetica/Minion, Frutiger/Apollo, Gill Sans/Perpetua, Gotham/Mercury, Legancy/Jensen, Syntax/Sabon, Univers/Meridien.

Italicize text with care and look for unintended italics in subscripts.

This poster is 16” × 12” (1152 × 864 pt), uses Helvetica Neue with a 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 pt scale ladder, and is legible on most screens.

Keep line length short and hyphenate instead of fully justifying.

Establish subordinate content with italics.

Reserve small text for tangents and detail beyond the first explanation.

Bold caps for panel subtitles

Use typographical garnish sparingly—be creative, but in small steps. A well-placed symbol or label can connect themes or indicate the purpose of text (e.g. triangles suggest a legend).

Align symbols independently of subscripts and superscripts.

Split a sentence into noun phrases or offer a natural pause, such as at a comma or a period.

Balance layout by shortening sentences—there are many ways to say something and some ways are easier to typeset.

Establish a visual hierarchy by emphasizing your hypothesis, conclusion and the key points that connect them.

Relegate protocols, technical methods, and other minutiae to the bottom of the poster.

Always be mindful of what the reader needs to know to understand enough to ask insightful questions and frontload this information.

Avoid long addressess—no postal codes, no zip codes.

Your work is a “study” and explores a “relationship” to look for an “effect”. Treat that as a given and say what is important.

Citations can be set in a block of text, with bold numbers like this 1. R. Bringhurst, Elements of Typographical Style. 4th ed (2012) and 2. W. Strunk Jr., Elements of Style (1918). Unless a specific citation style is required, use a compact style that also includes the title.

Don’t try to be snarky, cheeky or witty—most attempts do not succeed. Don’t trigger the jokers, cynics, cranks and curmudgeons.

Heed Strunk's Elements of Style:

Color powerfully classifies content. It is impossible to achieve this if everything is in color or if the poster is agrresively colourfully branded.

A ramp of colors of the same hue (e.g. green, blue) is useful to communicate continuous quantity. Use a single salient color (e.g. orange, magenta) to underscore a key theme, observation or conclusion.

Design for accessibility by colorblind readers.

The first color to appear should begin the core story.

Map salience to pertinence. When used in moderation, colors like orange or magenta say “look here”. You cannot look everywhere.

Avoid unintentional emphasis by equalizing for perceptual luminance.

Dense is not necessarily crowded.

Explain an encoding once and reuse it.

Create a visual key for complex encodings and choose graphical explanations over text.

Use Brewer palettes, even for greys.

Color blending can create distracting intersections of color.

Superimpose white outlines to emphasize shapes with an opaque fill.

Use multiply blend mode to layer dense data. Hollow points make excellent outliers.

Tabulate plots and text seamlessly with a column or row for explanations.

Do not use them to guide the eye, which can be achieved with spacing and alignment.

Don’t tell the reader what they're seeing: “a linear fit to a scatter plot” is redundant. Explain and interpret the figure instead.

Trends and their explanations should be the most salient.

Do not use excess ink on axes and navigation elements.

Highlight regions of interests with a solid color (or grey), not outlines.

Cue important observations and intervals with arrows or outlines.

Embed text and attach labels to data to avoid legends.

Italicize variables in fit diagnostics and use shaded bands for confidence intervals.

Callout lines should be rectilinear or at 45° if the graphic already has such elements.

Categorical variables in bar charts do not need an explicit axis. Specify sample sizes and what error bars represent (e.g. standard error of mean, `n = 5`). Report `P`-values with effect sizes or confidence intervals. A statistically significant observation isn’t necessarily of biological interest.

Establish continuity using figures that share an axis. Thresholds that span across panels (dashed lines, not dotted) lead the eye naturally to help tell the data story.

Use grids sparingly. Do not divide the plot more finely than precision allows.

Use grey for baseline, control or reference conditions. Dark grey is easier on the eyes than pure black. Avoid dark bar outlines.

Look for opportunities to include key observations and explanations in the figure—don’t leave it to the main text, where it may be far from the graphic. Emphasize what quantities are important—anticipate the reader’s questions and answer them.

If acknowledging institutional support, place it next to the logo.

Use vector-based logos, not low-resolution bitmaps. Do not change logos’ aspect ratio or crowd it with other elements—both are likely against its branding style.