The Poster Nobody Stops At, and the One People Do

A poster is not a paper on a wall. It competes for the attention of someone walking past a corridor of forty others, holding a coffee, with twenty minutes before the next session.

That is the whole design problem, and most posters are built as though the reader had already decided to stop. For a concrete operational example of how a workplace tool approaches a related coordination problem, see read more.

What the reader is doing

Scanning at two metres. They read your title and, if it works, your headline finding. Then they decide.

If they stop, they read for perhaps ninety seconds before either talking to you or leaving.

If they talk to you, the poster has done its job and the conversation is the actual event.

So the poster has two jobs: get someone to stop, and give them enough that a conversation can start. Not to convey the paper.

The title

Read from further away than anything else, and it decides most of the stopping.

State the finding, not the topic, where your field permits. "X did not reduce Y in three countries" gets stopped at; "An investigation of X and Y" does not.

Large. Readable at three or four metres.

Short enough to be read at a glance.

The layout

One finding, prominent. The single most important number or figure, large, near the top, readable at two metres. If someone reads only one thing, this is it.

Three sections at most. Question, what you did, what you found. Implications if there is room.

Radically less text than feels right. A common guideline is under 800 words for the whole poster, and most posters have three times that.

Large font throughout. If you are unsure, it is too small. Body text readable at a metre.

Generous white space. A dense poster is skipped, whatever is on it.

A clear reading path. Columns or a numbered flow, so it is obvious where to start and where to go next. A poster that has to be decoded is not read.

The figure

The centrepiece. One large, clean figure showing the main result.

Labelled axes, in words, readable at distance.

Everything not doing work removed — gridlines, extra series, legends with six entries.

Highlight the comparison. If the point is that two things differ, the eye should find those two immediately.

A figure taken from the paper usually does not work. Paper figures are for study; poster figures are for two metres. Rebuild it.

What to leave off

The full method. Enough that the finding is interpretable, no more.

The literature review. A sentence.

Regression tables. Almost never readable and almost never necessary.

Long conclusions. Two lines.

Your institution's branding at the size of your title.

Acknowledgements in large type. Small, at the bottom.

The session itself

The part people prepare least and where the value is.

Stand next to it, and look approachable. A presenter reading their phone loses the people who were deciding whether to interrupt.

Have a thirty-second version ready. Someone stops, you say what you did and what you found in two sentences, and then you find out what they are interested in. See the three-minute version.

Ask what they work on. The poster session is a conversation format, and the useful ones start with you asking rather than presenting.

Do not deliver the whole poster to everyone. Give the short version and let them ask.

Bring something to hand over — a page with the abstract, a link, a code to scan. People who liked it will not remember to look you up later.

Have a way to note contacts. The person who asked the interesting question is the one to follow up with.

Practical points

Check the board dimensions and orientation before printing. Every poster session contains someone whose poster does not fit.

Bring your own fixings. The provided ones run out.

Print somewhere you can collect from, or use a fabric poster that folds into hand luggage — printing on arrival is a common failure point.

Have a digital copy, on your phone, in case the printed one does not survive the journey.

Check it from two metres before you finalise. On a screen everything is readable; in a corridor it is not.

Posters are not a lesser format

Worth saying, because they are frequently treated as a rejection.

The conversations are better than the ones after a talk. Twenty minutes with someone genuinely interested in your specific question beats three questions from a room.

They suit work in progress, because the format is a discussion. See presenting work that is not finished.

They are how many people meet the person whose work they have read.

A well-designed poster with a prepared presenter gets more useful feedback than a mediocre talk — and the effort required is smaller.

The short version

The title and one finding do the stopping, at two metres, so make them large and specific.

Under 800 words, three sections, one clean figure.

Rebuild the figure — the paper version does not work at distance.

Prepare the thirty-second version, and ask people what they work on rather than delivering the poster at them.

For an independent authoritative reference, consult the MIT Communication Lab for academic communication guidance.