Link roundup for July 2025

It’s been a month. What has happened around conference poster sessions?

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The quest to perfect the online poster session continues!

Macarthur and Drude posted a slide deck with a brief explanation of how they created a small online poster session using ThingLink. This allows you to create an online space that people can navigate through, click buttons to bring up specific posters, and listen to a short recorded video presentation.

The slide deck doesn’t do justice to the experience, so I encourage you to visit their poster session. 

I tried this on my phone and laptop. Both worked well. I like the navigation for this session. I found it very intuitive and smooth.

I don’t like that the recorded presentations that I saw have small heads that often cover part of the poster, with no option to move them. I am not sure if there is any possibility for interaction between either the presenter and the audience or other audience members. 

Even on a larger screen, some poster titles are hard to read. This is a problem with the poster design, not a failure of the format. But this makes me worry slightly about whether this successful approach would scale to larger poster sessions. Browsing is an important aspect of poster sessions, and this set-up seems to make that difficult. If I want to get in close to a poster, I have to click that specific poster, maybe zoom to read the title, and possibly pause the recorded presentation.

Macarthur V, Drude F. 2025. Bringing research to life: an immersive virtual poster gallery. In: University of Cumbria Learning & Teaching Conference, 18 June 2025, University of Cumbria, Lancaster, UK (unpublished). https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8957

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A very robust finding about conferences is that oral presentations are more likely to become journal articles than poster presentations. But how much do conference organizers have their thumb on the scale?

A recent paper looking at the reporting of randomized clinical trials at conferences found, not a difference in publication, but a difference in the quality of project reported.

Poster abstracts had lower overall reporting quality scores compared to oral abstracts. This could be partly attributed to the more rigorous evaluation process of oral presentations by scientific committee. Given the limited number of podium slots and the high volume of submissions, it may be that higher-quality studies are selected for oral presentations.

Paheerathan S, Flitti D, Cobourne MT, Hua F, Pandis N, Seehra J. 2025. Reporting quality of randomized controlled trial abstracts presented at the European Orthodontic Society Congress between 2015–2024: has there been an improvement over time? European Journal of Orthodontics 47(4): cjaf039. https://doi.org/10.1093/ejo/cjaf039 

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S. Kamoun wrote a couple of blog posts one reasons to publish posters. I agree with most things, but warn against this:

Having a DOI for your poster allows you to include it in your CV under publications.

There is nothing special about a DOI that turns a conference poster into a publication. Many CVs I have seen have a separate section for publications and conference presentations. Trying to pass off the latter as the former will be seen as obvious puffery.

But maybe that was advice that ChatGPT dreamed up. Both of the posts below are written with “assistance” from ChatGPT. I appreciate the disclosure.

Kamoun S. 2023. Why you should publish your posters. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8154941 

Kamoun S. 2025 Why I’m skipping the Congress this year (And why you should still publish your posters). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15863849 

• • • • •

Almost as old as the blog but new to me post on confusing comic page layouts.

 Always make it easy for a reader to know which way to look next.

• • • • •

If you have ever wanted a Norman Romanesque look for your posters, may I direct you to the Historic Tale Construction Kit Bayeux.

Hat tip to Ian Coomber.

• • • • •

I don’t have access to this article by Amy Pepper, but some of you might.

Pepper A. 2025. How to develop and present a conference poster. Nursing Older People. https://doi.org/10.7748/nop.2025.e1516 

I couldn’t help but notice while looking for this article that another article by Davina Calbraith came out in 2020 with the exact same title:

Calbraith D. 2020. How to develop and present a conference poster. Nursing Standard 35(9): 46-50. https://doi.org/10.7748/ns.2020.e11468

And it’s not just the title that causes déja vu. The “Reflective activity” for both articles is very similar. 

2020:

‘How to’ articles can help to update your practice and ensure it remains evidence based. Apply this
article to your practice. Reflect on and write a short account of:
1. How reading this article will improve your poster development or presentation skills.
2. How you could use this information to educate nursing students or colleagues wanting to develop
a conference poster.

2025:

‘How to’ articles can help to update your practice and ensure it remains evidence based. Apply this article to your practice. Reflect on and write a short account of:
• How this article might improve your practice when designing and presenting a conference poster.
• How you could use this information to educate nursing students or your colleagues on the appropriate technique and evidence base when designing and presenting a conference poster.

Maybe this is standard boilerplate in nursing journals? I don’t know.

• • • • •

How to use peer review to improve student posters.

Emery KL, Shepard MD, Matthew SJ. 2025. The effectiveness of online peer-feedback
for group interaction and assessment quality in a high-enrolment and culturally diverse undergraduate
topic. in: 11th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’25). Valencia, 17-20 June 2025. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd25.2025.20129 and https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/files/162584869/Emery_Effectiveness_P2025.pdf 

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And finally, in “Cool things I haven’t seen done before”.

Biologist Chris Eckert is retiring. (Good luck and enjoy, fine sir!) So for his last professional poster at the 2025 meeting of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, what did he do?

He held a garage sale. 

 Brilliant! Hat tip to Andrea Wishart and credit to Janice Freedman for the photo.

• • • • • 

Thank you! Your next link roundup will be here on the last Thursday of August! 

Critique: Small town fungi goes to the big city

Today we have a trio of posters from Stephen Kutos. Click to enlarge!

This is the first of the posters chronologically, and already shows a lot of sophistication in the design. There are usually few white on black posters at large conferences, and they stand out from the pack. 

The poster has a clear visual hierarchy: the network diagrams get the most real estate, and there is a clear “What’s the story?” summary right next to it. 

The diagrams look like art. Abstract art, mind you, but they are visually striking and different than bar charts and scatter plots. But while they look great, I think they might have needed just one sentence to describe what they show, and how.

The methods get less space, and things like logos and QR codes are present but small and not distracting. (The QR code is no longer operational, though.)

A common problem of many posters is trying to fill every part of the poster with content. Stephen showed restraint by leaving space on either side of “So, what’s the story?”

The orange and blue are easily visible to someone with common colourblindness. Hooray for accessibility! I am a little concerned about whether there is enough contrast of the orange against the dark background, particularly in the title. That could be a different barrier to accessibility.

This poster was sent some time ago. When I reached out to check that it was still okay to show, Steve generously sent two more! 

From time to time, I have experimented with making a poster with the title on the left. Stephen manages it more successfully here than any of my attempts! And I love the split tree / mushroom graphic.

While the first poster might have leaned a little too far away from explanations, this one might lean a little too far into explanations. This comes in at about 700 words. Better than most, but this might be a bit tricky to read in five minutes. This poster also has a lot of small icons that need deciphering. There are not more graphs than the first poster, but the graphs are more complex.

Not sure if this is a PDF conversion issue, but a couple of elements needed more separation to avoid touching:

And here is number three: 

One of the nice things about seeing several posters from the same person or lab is that you can see common stylistic elements. This one pulls some features from the other two. It is reminiscent of the first in its structure and strong visual hierarchy (big summary up top, smaller data, still smaller methods, very small logos), and use of colour. It resembles the second from its use of icons throughout.

There is a big visual summary at the top, some smaller detailed data underneath, still smaller methods shown graphically, and the fine print neatly corralled at the bottom. The word count comes in at about 300, making this very manageable for a quick read.

Only a couple of things come to mind as things I’d like to try. The dotted lines used for the central row to organize the sampling sites and separate the graphs work better than solid lines, but I might have tried going even thinner. 

The colours work well, but they are a bit muted. I might have tried to make one of the main colours a bit brighter to add just a little visual pop; maybe the green. 

Thanks to Steve for sharing this set of fine work!

Critique: Toads aren’t picky

I’m always pleased to show an award winning poster! This week’s poster is courtesy of Audrey Kelly. 

This poster won the Victor Hutchison Graduate Student Poster Award in Ecology, Natural History, Distibution, and Behavior, awarded by the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. (Whew, that’s a mouthful!) The award is given at the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

Audrey clearly did the editorial work on the text. This poster clocks in at around 400 words, which is just about perfect. Most people can read it in five minutes. Plus, the two column layout and colour choices are fine.

This was done in PowerPoint, and there are a few tells for this. 

The typeface? Calibri, the former Windows default.

Those callouts? Only PowerPoint makes those shapes.

Where I think the poster struggles slightly is with the two graphs of data. I’m reasonably sure they were created in a different software package in imported into PowerPoint. This can be seamless, but the seams show a little here.

1. The size of the graphs don’t quite match the available space, particularly on the right. 
2. Similarly, the white background makes the graph doesn’t match the look of the rest of the poster. 

Not a lot that can be done about those in PowerPoint. Those changes need to be made in the graphic software before importing them. Once the poster is mostly laid out, figure out the space available for the graphs and tweak the aspect ratios. Then the white background feels deliberate rather than accidental.

The blue in the bars and boxes of the graphs appearing in the title bar and pool diagram help tie the graphs in with the rest of the poster, however.

Just for the heck of it, I tried revising the poster. No major changes, just a few different choices to see how they would look.

I changed the typeface from the “fine but everyone has seen that Windows system default too often” Calibri to Jost. There is some other minor tweaking, like removing the bullet points and increasing the line spacing very slightly.

The callouts got a slightly different treatment. Because the callouts are similar to comic word balloons, I tried a handwritten typeface, Ready for Anything by Blambot. I tried to make the callouts more consistent with the size of the material they are next to.

I also filled the callouts with colour to make them stand out slightly more. It’s a slightly lightened shade of the background, so it still harmonizes. In retrospect, I would also have lightened up the lines around them. 

Here’s the before and after overlaid.

 

External links

Audrey Kelly on ORCiD 

Audrey Kelly on LinkedIn 

Critique: Biconcave backbones in 3-D!

Friend of the blog Mike Taylor gave me the okay to share this poster some time ago. Get out your 3-D glasses, and click to enlarge!

This poster has, dare I say, a touch of elegance to it.

Part of what gives this poster its style is the serif type. At a glance I was reasonably sure that it was not Time New Roman, which a closer inspection confirmed:

The downward serif on the “2” is very distinctive, and helps identify this as some form of Baskerville. This is an example of how doing something just slightly different leaves an impression.

Serifs can sometimes be difficult to see at a distance, but the large size and generous spacing keep it legible.

Big photograph taking up a lot of the space? Love it. When this is on the poster board, it should sit right at eye level.

The layout of the poster clearly shows this poster is meant to be read across in rows. The single continuous margin between the second and final rows signals that clearly.

What about the 3-D glasses I mentioned? It isn’t immediately obvious, but the photograph in the lower right corner can be viewed in 3-D using red-green glasses. I love it when posters can break into the third dimension, and it’s a shame that this technique is a bit tricky to implement. 

If you want to use this 3-D technique, there are two pain points. 

First, you need to get your own 3-D glasses, since conference goers are not likely to be carrying their own in their backpack. A super quick search shows that you can get them for as little as 45 cents or less, but you have to buy in bulk. Personally, I think that is a reasonably small fraction of what going to a conference costs.

Second, you need test the printer your poster will be printed from. Ink on paper may not look the same as light on a computer screen. To work well, the tint of the glasses has to match the colours on the printed image. The more exact the match of the colour on the lens to the colour on the paper, the better. I suggest making a small version of the 3-D image that can be printed alone to test how it looks with your glasses, so you don’t have to print the entire poster.

Thank you, Mike, for sharing! 

Related posts

Critique: Dinosaur necks 

External links

The “Biconcavoposeidon” poster is published  

Baskerville vs. Times New Roman 

Critique: Minimalist RNA

I spotted today’s poster when researching the Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science conference for the June link roundup. I reached out to its creator, Jakub Zeman, who sent along a copy and how he made it. Click to enlarge!

I’ll let Jakub tell the story from here (lightly edited). 

Our model focuses on how pluripotent stem cells develop into cardiomyocytes. Cells make multiple decisions over several days to become the correct cell type. My research explores how this is regulated at the translation level. Many processes signal to ribosomes the need for specific proteins to be made. We believe that ribosomes are the key decision-makers, producing those proteins in the right quantities at the right time. Thus, the ribosome is a central element in my poster.

I had previously experimented with the #BetterPoster concept, but for this special conference (Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science), I decided to take it to the next level. 

I was focused on making figures for our latest manuscript, so I opted for simple vector graphics and minimal charts to illustrate my story. 

The ribosome is complex, but can be simplified to a basic shape that represents large and small subunits. I added a ribbon symbolising the newly formed protein. The mRNA molecule is usually depicted as a straight line passing through the ribosome, but this time, I represented it with an interface between two differently coloured spaces.

In the top section, I showcased examples of cellular processes communicating with ribosomes.

In the bottom section, I presented a sequence of cell types recapitulating cardiac differentiation, along with two simple charts, and all other necessary details.

I chose a palette with four colours: two close ones for the background and two distinct ones for the ribosomal subunits. For different cell types, I created a sequential colour palette to illustrate how they get closer to becoming cardiomyocytes with each step.

I designed my poster using Affinity Designer on macOS, using different weights of Helvetica Neue to highlight key text while maintaining a clean and simple typography.

By limiting myself to simple shapes, few colours, and minimal charts, I created a poster that deviates significantly from a traditional scientific poster. But I use a poster as a visual aid to tell my story, aiming to engage viewers and encourage interaction, rather than having them silently read the dense text and charts.

I admire this poster’s boldness and simplicity. There is only one thing that I question: the rays of words surrounding the small subunit at the top. By the time you reach the rightmost phrase, “RNA modification,” you are reading almost upside down.

I made some similar text in PowerPoint.

 Kind of tough to read those three words and phrases on the right.

 One alternative: stack the letters.

But you are almost forced to use all caps here to prevent letters with descenders (like “g”) dropping down and running into adjacent letters. The variable width of the letters also contributes to making this hard to look at. And because we are not used to characters being stacked, these long words are hard to read. 

Second alternative:

I like this more than my stacked letter option. But it would be nice if there was an even number of words, because then you would have an even number facing each direction.  This, to me, is more readable even though it is less consistent.

Normally, consistency is a good thing! But sometimes readability is more important than consistency. Have a look at this soundtrack cover for an upcoming movie:

This logo has four names arranged in a circle. Three of the names (“Richards,” “Storm,” and “Storm”) have the bottom of the letters towards the center of a circle. But for the fourth name, “Grimm,” the top of the letters are towards the center of the circle. 

Thanks to Jakub for sharing his work! 

Related posts

Link roundup for June 2025 

Link roundup for June 2025

Let’s see if I can get back into a regular rhythm of posting these!

• • • • •

There continues to be a small group working on creating posters by computing methods.

A new preprint by Pang and colleagues not only dives into poster creation, with a program called PosterAgent, but how to evaluate computationally generated posters, called Paper2Poster. Existing poster assessment rubrics are not good for evaluating computationally generated posters, because the computer makes mistakes that humans don’t make.

(O)ur Paper2Poster pipeline, built on a fully open-source toolbox... surpasses existing GPT-4o–based multi-agent approaches on nearly all metrics while consuming 87% fewer tokens.

While they claim their Paper2Poster assessment rates posters similarly to humans, it’s worth noting their comparison is based on one human rating five posters.

Their technique involves converting completed academic papers to posters. Since most posters are made well before a paper is ready for publication, we are still a long way from something that will be useful to most poster makers. And I’m not sure large scale automation for poster creation is necessary.

Pang W, Lin KQ, Jian X, He X, Torr P. 2025. Paper2Poster: Towards multimodal poster automation from scientific papers. arXiv: arXiv:2505.21497. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21497

• • • • •

Benedikt Ehinger  has created Illustrator templates for conference posters that are free to use. Here’s an example:

Because it’s in Illustrator, there are a couple of features that you might not find in other static templates. 

1. Box backgrounds adjust for titles.
2. Borders can be easily resized; the curves don’t change with rescaling.

• • • • •

Staying with Benedikt for a moment, he also makes art from his graduate students’ theses. Examples:

 The plot above is made from the first 10.000 letters of the student’s thesis.

Benedikt writes:

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. 

• • • • •

If you are teaching using conference posters, Stefanile has a paper that describes how to teach people how to present posters:

(T)he approach of preparing a poster, emphasized here, involved a collaborative effort between the presenter and their colleagues/mentor to properly prepare the poster, particularly emphasizing the use of consistent best practices when presenting the poster. 

Stefanile A. 2025. Designing and presenting an oral poster presentation for undergraduate students’ research. Natural Sciences Education 54: e70018. https://doi.org/10.1002/nse2.70018 

• • • • •

Sticking with teaching, Nicola Koyama has built in some self-assessment practices that help students engage with the material. Excerpt:

Some of Nicola’s students aren’t keen at first, she says “I think they grumble having to do something. But then at the end... they’re excited to know whether they've judged their poster correctly.”

Koyama N. 2025. Know where you atand: How incentivized self-assessment transforms poster presentations. Liverpool John Moores University Student Experience Proceedings Special edition: Case studies in assessment and feedback design: https://doi.org/10.24377/studentexp3175

• • • • •

I have frequently reference Nate Piekos and Blambot, one of my favourite supplier of comic style fonts, but I am not sure I have referred to his page of compiled lettering tips.

This line cheat may be helpful in some poster layout situations, where you might be able to gain a line back to make text fit into allotted spaces better.

• • • • • 

This next paper doesn’t mention posters directly, but is one of the best discussions I have ever read about the challenges of holding an online conference that feels like a conference and not a Zoom call. 

The problems are partly organizational. The organizers wanted real time events, not asynchronous ones. This meant figuring out events for many time zones.

The problems are partly technical. What software exists that can make people feel like they re in physical spaces that encourage the equivalent of hallway conversations? They describe an app called QiQoChat, which I have not heard of before.

The organizers also realized that they needed events that would bring people together. For one, they live music. 

This paper encourages me to think that a good online poster session is possible. Recommended.

Bastian M, Flatø EH, Baraitser L, Jordheim H, Salisbury L, van Dooren T. 2022. ‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality. Geo: Geography and Environment 9(2): e00114. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/geo2.114

• • • • •

In two gynecology conferences, 46.8% of oral presentations were published compared to just 14.2% of poster presentations. As is common, there is no discussion of why this difference exists or whether tany steps should be taken to try to increase the amount of publications deriving from posters.

Rotem R, O’Leary BD, McCarthy CM, O’Reilly BA, O'Sullivan OE. From conference to journal: Analyzing the path to publication for EUGA and JOGS 2022 abstracts. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics: in press. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijgo.70319

• • • • •

This conference report makes me regret that I wasn’t able to attend Woodstock of Biology² + Night Science (#TCTeAC on Bluesky).  Presenters got walk-up music, there was a wedding (!), questions people were too embarrassed to ask, and much more. Seen from a distance, it sounds like it feels like Science Online meetings used to. It sounds like a lot of fun was had on top of the science.

But. 

Poster session in the forest — because… why not?

 (Photo from Barak Rotblat on Bluesky.)

Although it is apprently a volleyball court in a forest.

(Photo by Nir Eynon.)

(Photo by Zoe Harrington on Bluesky.)

(Picture from Claire on Bluesky.)

Um. I, personally, can think of several reasons why not. I know some people would see one tiny woodlands creature and be, “THERE’S A BUG THAT’S IT I’M OUT.” 

Or slugs, for that matter. This photo...

Was accompanied by the text, “INNAPROPRIATE SLUG SONGS.” (Photo by ‪Valeriy Kutsyna.) 

And posters were burned? 

(Photo again from Claire on Bluesky.)

Not sure I can get behind that. Even if if it was voluntary.

The conference ended when police showed up.

• • • • •

And that’s all for now! Thank you, as always, for your attention! 

Critique: Computing crocetin

This week's is courtesy of the extremely patient Dimitra Bezantakou. Dimitra was nice enough to say that she found the blog helpful as she was creating the poster below. Click to enlarge!

This is a common three column poster, but there are a few things that help set it apart.

Bolding key words and phrases in the introduction makes reading the text faster. The text has ample spacing, which also helps readability.

The methods are shown in a way that add some visual interest to the poster. There is a lot of text and anonymous graphs, so the blocks of colour were quite badly needed to stop the poster from being too monotone.

The title is the biggest thing on the poster. And while I am not excited about the logo to the left of the title, the subdued colour and size stop it from distracting from the title.

Wider margins might improve the look of the poster. As clean and orderly as the columns are, the space between the columns looks extremely tight. The graphs in the centre column are just too close to the text on either side. 

Here is a quick revision with the central graphics reduced to 95% of their original size:

This helps. Probably the same approach could be used to bring the text away from the edges of the page, which are also closer than readers might expect.

How to pitch a poster in lightning talk (ePosters blog guest post)

The good people at ePosters asked if I would write something for their blog, They asked nicely, so I said, “I’ve been meaning to write about flash talks where people pitch their posters. How about that?” They said, “Okay.” 👍 And now it’s done and up.

Please visit ePosters for “How to pitch your poster in a flashy lightning talk.”

I hope you enjoy!

Poster controversies

Over a year ago, I saved a few tweets about controversies that erupted over a couple of posters at a Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. At the time, I was aware that there was a lot of discussion on social media but didn’t have the bandwidth to follow it closely.

Today I went looking for summaries of the controversy, and found a couple, which I have linked below. I don’t pretend that these summaries are complete or perfect, but I think they give at least a hint of what happened.

Most conferences do minimal screening of conference posters. They also do not necessarily do great monitoring of what goes up on unused poster boards, or whether people post the work they originally submitted. Normally, these are harmless.

But I do think it is worth asking under what conditions posters should be removed by conference organizers. If an organization doesn’t have policies for that, they should make them, and make them public, rather than trying to react on the fly.

External links

The censorious Society for Personality and Social Psychology (13 February 2024)

SPSP censorship 2.0: “We are above the rules” (21 February 2024)

SPSP addresses convention poster concerns and outlines next steps (29 February 2024)

 

Critique: Posters have entered the chat

Some time ago, Greg Fell shared an interesting poster. (You may not be able to see it due to user settings.) I reached out to the creator, Anton Pottegård. He sent a slightly earlier version of this poster. Click to enlarge!

This poster does a couple of things. First, it draws inspiration from an existing design that people already understand. Second, it is memorable because it breaks from the conventional “journal article on a page” format. Others have used the text message style to create concert posters.

I don’t know exactly how this particular poster was created, but it is not hard to find websites that can emulate a chat.

What is not clear to me from this version is how someone is supposed to get the abstract mentioned at the bottom of the poster. I appreciate that the PDF icon looks like what you would see in a text message, but a short, easy to remember URL might have done the job, too.

Is this format appropriate to all posters? I don’t think so. This study has a simple result: “There’s no effect.” Many other projects are nowhere near as easy to summarize.

I am sure that some people will argue that this format is never appropriate for an academic poster, for two reasons. 

First, it refers to data but does not show those data. While I understand the reasoning behind the “I must be able to personally inspect every data point before I can be convinced,” I don’t think that level of intense scrutiny is at all necessary for a conference poster. Save it for journal articles. 

Second, there are no references. I am neutral on the subject, but forthcoming research shows that people think less of posters without at least one reference.

Bonus posters 

Anton wrote, “Overall, doing strong posters is very important to me!” He shared more that he created.

Here we have one that is very different in style from the one above:

While the first poster imitates the glossy interface that almost everyone has become familiar with, this second poster uses a hand drawn style. I like the style, but I worry that the summary in the top half is a little hard to read.

(The QR code at the bottom still works!)

And this is one of Anton’s favourites:

Same style as above, but the summary is shorter, larger, and more readable.

While this poster may have been on on Anton’s favoruites, I suspect it would not be everyone’s cup of tea. I personally wouldn’t make a poster that included someone on a toilet, but different strokes for different folks.

Pros: Memorable.

Cons: I don’t see that it as relevant to the content. If this was a paper about gastrointestinal function, I wouldn’t question it is much.

Related posts

Critique: Protein biosynthesis 

External links

Anton Pottegård home page

Sample posters by Anton

A quick way to assess posters

If you are looking for a rubric to assess conference posters quickly, this might fill the bill. This rubric has gone through a couple of versions. This is the most recent, presented on a poster this summer and archived on ResearchGate.

There are four categories:

• Layout
• Science-based order (IMRAD)
• Use of graphics
• Central message communicating (Wordy and / or busy)

Each of these categories gets a score from one to four, with one being worst (“Poor”) and four being the best (“Superior”). I’m going to present the criteria for each score in lists. At the end of this post, I’m going to put a version of this table that looks horrible on the blog, but that you can cut and paste easily.

Layout

1. Poor: Neither clean nor straightforward
2. Sub-par: Much left to be desired / better (4 column?)
3. Acceptable: Some left to be desired / better (3 column?)
4. Superior: Information clean, straightforward, organized

Science-based order (IMRAD)

1. Poor: Much disorder/chaotic, no references
2. Sub-par: Some disorder (or missing), no references
3. Acceptable: Disorder and references or order without references
4. Superior: Good order and one or more references

Use of graphics

1. Poor: Visually unpleasant
2. Sub-par: Much left to be desired / better
3. Acceptable: Some left to be desired / better
4. Superior: Visually helpful, eye catching, pleasant to eyes

Central message communicating (Wordy and / or busy)

1. Poor: Very distracting and hard to review / understand (‘wall of text’; very busy and / or very wordy)
2. Sub-par: Distracting and hard to quickly review/understand (majority was text; busy and / or wordy)
3. Acceptable: Decent communication (some wordiness but could be quickly reviewed / understood)
4. Superior: Concise communication (neither busy nor wordy, use of bullet points, easy, and quick to review/understand)

 Now that you know what the rubric is, let me address who developed rubric, how it was developed, and why I’m writing about it.

Michael Peeters and colleagues have published a trio of papers, likely with more to come, developing and testing the rubric presented above. The papers mostly revolve around ensuring that the rubric above is reliable. If you are not in developing and validating assessments, the technical details in the paper probably need not concern you.

They also compare their rubric to two other methods of assessing posters: a more detailed, analytic rubric, and a more holistic assessment. The rubric presented above gives similar results to the analytic rubric, but the analytic rubric takes so much longer to score that is may not be practical. The holistic rating scheme was faster yet, but the reliability took a hit.

The bottom line to date: This rubric is a good mix of reliable and practical.

I’m interested in research on one of the new posters, which uses this rubric to try to tease apart what people are responding to when they make decisions about whether to give posters a “1” or a “4” in each category.

The team find three things lead to higher scores. In no particular order:

1. No abstract! (I’ve been beating that drum for years.)
2. Having references.
3. Having a QR code. (This puzzles me. Sure what the code is used for should matter?)

The poster also indicates poster type matters, but doesn’t go into details.

References

Khadka S, Holt K, Peeters MJ. 2024. Academic conference posters: Describing visual impression in pharmacy education. Exploratory Research in Clinical and Social Pharmacy 13: 100423. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rcsop.2024.100423

Peeters MJ, Gonyeau MJ. 2025. Comparing analytic and mixed-approach rubrics for academic poster quality. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 89(3): 101372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajpe.2025.101372 

Peeters MJ, Cor MK, Castleberry AN, Gonyeau MJ. 2025. Comparing holistic and mixed-approach rubrics for academic poster quality. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 89(4): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajpe.2025.101379

Peeters MJ, Kaun MA, Schmude KA. 2025. Poster type enhances academic conference poster quality. AACP Annual Meeting 2025. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391907265_2-yr-RevisedMAR_AACP2025 (ResearchGate login)

Peeters MJ, Cor MK. 2025. Academic conference poster quality rubric Version 2.0. AACP Annual Meeting 2025. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391907268_MAR20_AACP2025 (ResearchGate login)

External links

Michael J. Peeters home page

Michael J. Peeters on ResearchGate

Rating	Score	Layout	Science-based order (IMRAD)	Use of graphics	Central message communicating (Wordy and / or busy)
Poor	1	Neither clean nor straightforward	Much disorder/chaotic, no references	Visually unpleasant	Very distracting and hard to review / understand (‘wall of text’; very busy and / or very wordy)
Sub-par	2	Much left to be desired / better (4 column?)	Some disorder (or missing), no references	Much left to be desired / better	Distracting and hard to quickly review/understand (majority was text; busy and / or wordy)
Acceptable	3	Some left to be desired / better (3 column?)	Disorder and references or order without references	Some left to be desired / better	Decent communication (some wordiness but could be quickly reviewed / understood)
Superior	4	Information clean, straightforward, organized	Good order and one or more references	Visually helpful, eye catching, pleasant to eyes	Concise communication (neither busy nor wordy, use of bullet points, easy, and quick to review/understand)

Link roundup for May 2025

It’s been a while since I’ve had the brainpower to pull one of these together. But now?

Since its debut, the billboard format has been admired and disliked. A new paper compared it to more standard layouts, and found it generally came out ahead. But the variation is wide! The authors write:

Both poster formats could reach high scores for all items, which indicated that mindful poster layout is essential for clear and engaging scientific dissemination.

The discussion is nuanced and helpful about what features make a poster stand out. Not too much text and well organized are a couple of points.

Bentsen L, Østergaard DE. 2025. What makes a good poster? Evaluating #BetterPoster and classic formats at a scientific cancer conference. Journal of Cancer Education: in press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13187-025-02622-1

• • • • •

Better poster session planning

A journal article for conference organizers on improving poster sessions.

Ameen S, Chandran S, Tikka SK, Menon V, Praharaj SK, Sarkhel S. 2025. Streamlining poster sessions: Tips for organisers. Indian Journal of Psychiatry 67(5): 453-458. https://doi.org/10.4103/indianjpsychiatry.indianjpsychiatry_383_25

This draws a little too much from conferences in psychiatry, but many good suggestions here.

• • • • •

The carbon footprint of conferences is significant. This abstract is one of the first that I have seen that tries to estimate the costs of poster sessions.

The energy required to display posters on a TV screen was estimated to be 263 kWh in 2021 and 292 kWh in 2022, indicating a 93% reduction in energy consumption.

What the authors don’t appear to include in their estimates is the initial cost of conference venues buying equipment to show the posters.

Livingston AJ, Barquin DL, Margolin EJ, Wilcox Vanden Berg RN, Foreman JR, Peterson AC, Scales CD, Antonelli J, Lipkin ME, Faerber GJ, Preminger GM, Medairos RA. 2024. MP17-19 Beyond the science: The hidden costs of printed poster presentations at urology conferences. Journal of Urology 211(5S): e299. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.JU.0001008628.15460.84.19

• • • • •

Duncan and colleagues also have an article for conference organizers who want alternatives to the typical poster session. They tried a form of facilitated poster session. Attendees were asked during registration of they wanted to present in this facilitated format, and were grouped by some common element, often methods.

The format consisted of three parts:

1. Three minute presentations from about five poster presenters.
2. Fifteen minute panel discussion of the whole group.
3. A facilitated discussion for about 45 minutes, where audience members selected which poster presenter they wanted to have a deeper discussion with.
   

This first trial with this format worked well. People found this format valuable. Still, the authors list multiple ways that they could improve it. 

(C)hallenges included difficulty and confusion in session facilitation, insufficient facilitator guidance, and dissatisfaction with timing.

It isn’t clear to me what role the posters are playing in this whole event. Because the discussion sessions begins with lightning talks that are displayed as one to three slides, the posters feel superfluous.

Duncan S, Cawood A, Tuttle J, Putnam R. 2024. Organizing facilitated poster discussion sessions: Their inspiration, planning, and implementation at the C*Sci2023 Conference. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice 9(1): 16. https://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.716

• • • • •

And while we’re talking, conference organizers, could you please make seating available in poster sessions?

(P)oster sessions also often require presenters to stand on the spot for long periods of time, typically up to several hours. Furthermore, attendees interested in browsing posters often find themselves in small, cramped spaces without a place to sit. Many invisible disabilities, such as fibromyalgia, endometriosis and Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, make it incredibly challenging for individuals to stand for a prolonged period of time.

And those seats should be tall! Bar chairs! So a seated presenter is near eye level with someone standing to view a posters!

McClurg UL. 2024. A short guide to addressing accessibility at scientific conferences. Journal of Cell Science 137(10): https://doi.org/10.1242/jcs.261858

• • • • •

And one more dart at conference organizers who do this:

Also fun when the conference provides the incorrect poster board dimensions and then no one’s poster fits

That observation from Rheum Cat on Bluesky.

• • • • •

Francis provides a suggestion for how to get people to look at posters longer: recruit people to answer specific questions about a poster. This particular example had many people who agree to answer a survey about the poster, and only a “handful” declined. 

While this is a good strategy in theory, I suspect recruiting people to answer survey questions about it may be hard in practice.

Francis C. 2025. Participatory poster in NACTA increases viewer involvement. NACTA Journal 69(TT): https://doi.org/10.56103/nactaj.v69iTT.281

• • • • •

Visiobo appears to be a technique to try to provide a “guided tour” of a poster when no presenter is present. I’m having a hard time imaging how it works at a glance. I suspect watching a video would help.

Huang K, Jiang J, Lu H, Zhou H, An P. 2025. Visiobo: Assisting poster reading for multiple viewers with a projector-enhanced physical agent. Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3720146

• • • • •

Teaching with posters

When asked to make a conference poster for a class, the most enjoyable thing was working with a partner. The least enjoyable thing was the actual presentation, for a variety of reasons.

Matthew F. 2025. Integrating conference poster presentations into a data science class. Paper presented at 2025 ASEE -GSW Annual Conference, Arlington, TX, Texas.  https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--55061

• • • • •

More teaching with posters:

Friedlander H, Schaefer J. 2024. Utilizing a poster project as an assessment in an introductory abstract algebra course. PRIMUS 34(4): 392-412. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511970.2024.2312926

• • • • •

The value of conference posters in teaching is highlighted in this article:

Sims D, Swales C, Aitken D. 2025. Student poster conferences as a formative, authentic, inclusive and sustainable assessment practice. The Clinical Teacher 22(2): e70050. https://doi.org/10.1111/tct.70050

• • • • • 

Other advantages of using posters for teaching? I’ve added some emphasis to this summary.

As a result of presenting their results through a poster, students reported a deeper understanding of their research topic, an increased ability to articulate scientific concepts, and a better understanding of how to create a visually appealing poster. ... Moreover, they saw the poster as an outlet for their creativity.

Wierzchowski A, Wink D. 2024. Students’ experiences with the science and engineering practices in a workshop-based undergraduate research experience. Journal of Chemical Education 101(6): 2266-2278. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00035

 • • • • •

For me, this answer to the question posed in this article’s title is obvious:

Endsley P, Martinkus H, Chrisman M, Marchello N, Skarbek A. 2025. Why should you attend conference poster sessions? Discover Education 4(1): 64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-025-00462-1

But the attendees surveyed in this research suggested their motivations included

• Awareness, being able to understand existing policies
• Motivation, becoming energized and enthused
• Implementation, putting ideas into practice
• Collaboration, finding ways to cooperate

• • • • •

Online poster sessions

Whoever can find a way to make an engaging online poster session should have, like someone building a better mousetrap, the world beating a path to their door. This paper suggests some pathways forward:

Before the conference, participants expressed skepticism about networking opportunities for virtual attendees, which was confirmed in postconference survey comments. Virtual participants reported low engagement with virtual posters and recordings, and some struggled to find time to view virtual posters individually, which informed participants’ moderate satisfaction with virtual poster presentations

Wenger A, Bakkeren E, Granato E, Tecon R, Mitri S, Möbius W. 2025. MEEhubs2024: A hub-based conference on microbial ecology and evolution fostering sustainability. FEMS Microbiology Letters 372: in press. https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fnaf022

• • • • •

But maybe the engaging online poster session has already been created, and it’s... LinkedIn? The Royal Society of Chemistry’s annual virtual poster session, #RSCPoster, moved to LinkedIn in 2024 after years of being held on the “social media site that was named for a bird but that is now named for a adult movie rating,” and they reported their highest engagement ever.

Cotterell N, de Jongh PAJM, Noël T, Junkers T, Reddy CM, Anastasaki A, Randviir E. 2025. Celebrating 10 years of #RSCPoster. Chemical Science 16(7): 2950-2957. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/D5SC90028J

Also, this article has some great cartoons from Errant Science!

• • • • •

Preparing conference posters

Thurman and colleagues have a two part series on prepping for research posters.

Collaboration in Creation: A Guide for Preparing and Presenting Research Posters – Part 1, For Students  

This first part emphasizes that presenting a poster can be a challenge for students, because it represents a significant change in their relationship with their instructor, and with the material. Students may feel imposter syndrome from entering a professional environment for the first time.

Collaboration in Creation: A Guide for Preparing and Presenting Research Posters – Part 2, For Mentors 

This second part emphasizes time management in working with students. Their strategy is to lock down the text before doing any layout on the poster.

• • • • •

I have a like/hate relationship with templates. I understand why people want them, but existing templates are so often... mid. Now I have research that says why.

(W)hile templates help users converge to a final design quickly and partially alleviate the need for tedious decision-making, they may also lead to fixation and frustration when interactions do not support divergent thinking and flexible editing.

One point I appreciated was that just picking a template can be very time consuming. It’s like trying to decide what you want to watch on your streaming service: you probably spend as much time, if not more, looking at the option as watching your shows!

Nouraei F, Siu A, Rossi R, Lipka N. 2024. Thinking outside the box: Non-designer perspectives and recommendations for template-based graphic design tools. CHI EA ‘24: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article No. 326: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650967

• • • • •

This substantive 70 page document on poster design was, somewhat to my surprise, a bachelor student’s thesis project. It identifies three big challenges for poster makers:

1. Limited education on poster creation
2. Time management problems
3. Struggles to create visually effective posters and use design tools

Paavonsalo S. 2025. The Poster Puzzle – The challenges in the process of creating scientific posters. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202501191323

• • • • •

Poster to publication

More papers showing that conference oral presentations are more likely to be published than poster presentations.

39.4% of oral presentations are published compared to 30.5% of posters in urology.

Pursnani S, Feiertag J, Corey Z, Alzubaidi A, Lehman EB, Raman JD. 2024. Getting it across the finish line: Publication rates of abstracts presented at a major urologic conference. Urology 192: 188-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urology.2024.06.058

 • • • • •

In hip and joint medicine, 86.4% of oral presentations are published compared to 63.6% of posters. (Inexplicably, the authors claim in the abstract that 86.4% is “three times” 63.6%?)

Grace ZT, Imam N, Posner KM, Zaifman JM, Klein GR. 2024. Publication rates of poster and podium presentations at the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons annual meetings 2016 to 2019. The Journal of Arthroplasty 39(12): 3102-3106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arth.2024.06.019

 • • • • •

In the field of hand surgery, 67.8% of oral presentations are published compare to 59.2% of posters.

Stoker T, Millar B, Fones L, Ilyas Asif. 2024. Sixty-two percent of abstracts from the American Association of Hand Surgery Annual Meeting 2017-2020 are later published. Tower Health Research Day. 49.
https://scholarcommons.towerhealth.org/th_researchday/2023-2024/online_posters/49 

• • • • •

In radiology, 42.86% of oral presentations are published compared to 31.31% of posters. 

Joarder I, Ahmadi S, Khosa F. 2024. Gender and racial diversity in relation to publication rates at the Canadian Association of Radiology annual scientific meetings 2016 to 2019. Canadian Association of Radiologists Journal 75(2): 313-322. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08465371231210473

• • • • •

And an unspecified advantage in this conference abstract: “Abstracts that were published were more often presented orally(.)”

Schneider M, Dukaczewska A, van Beek DJ, Van den Heede K, Sharma G, Almquist M. 2024. 26 Talking the talk and posting the papers: Unveiling publishing patterns in ESES congress abstracts. British Journal of Surgery 111(Supplement_4): https://doi.org/10.1093/bjs/znae104.023

 • • • • •

Quick guides

I don’t think I’ve shared this blog post from our friends at Mind the Graph about creating an award-winning poster before. In brief:

1. Make a plan.
2. Make an outline.
3. Write the text.
4. Create the diagrams.
5. Print a small test version.
6. Crush the presentation.

• • • • •

From our friends at Animate Your Science comes An introvert’s guide to surviving a conference scientific poster session. In brief:

1. Posters are awesome!
2. Face your poster.
3. Point at your poster.
4. No alcohol.
5. Follow the golden rule.

This summary doesn’t do justice to some of the nuances in the full article. Points 2 and 3 in particular make more sense in the article than in my summary list.

• • • • •

Katie Eyer also has a Bluesky thread on attending a conference as an introvert. Excerpt:

(I) lean into substance and find opportunities for one-on-one connection. I’ll take one-on-one connection first: I like people, I just don’t like groups. At some point it occurred to me that it is entirely possible to just set up one-on-one opportunities to connect.

• • • • •

Also from Animate Your Science, their guide to creating a colour scheme for your poster.

• • • • •

Leonardo Jo has a tip for GGplot users:

You can save a ggplot as a vectorized .svg file ggsave(“file.svg0).

It will be completely vectorized, even text are still recognized as text boxes. The svg file can be opened in PowerPoint, Illustrator, or Inkscape.

Ant Stanley‬ thinks Bluesky could replace Twitter for conferences:

I think BlueSky will be significantly better for conferences than any other site. Organisers can create speaker starter packs to allow attendees to auto-follow all speakers. Also a custom feed of all folks skeeting abut a conference would be a big win.

• • • • •

The British Geriatric Society has an archive of over 1,100 posters that have been presented at British Geriatric Society events. Look, I’m just saying that if someone wanted to create a corpus to study poster design and trends, this might be a pretty good candidate.

• • • • •

And now to my social media feed and super quick links: 

David “Why Sharks Matter” Shiffman asked for his Blueksy followers to give poster advice to his students. Bluesky responded (including me, because I’m on Bluesky). There are some good quips and bon mots in the replies.

He has another thread about conference advice more generally, also with good suggestions.

• • • • •

First aid for figures by Helena Jambor. Helena also has great cheat sheets for image preparation.

There’s more in the linked blog post. 

• • • • •

I received this suggestion for an ad-free placeholder text generator. Hat tip to Rebecca Martínez.

• • • • •

From the weekly science glamour mag from the east side of the Atlantic (Nature – I’m talking about Nature), Scientific figures that pop: resources for the artistically challenged.

• • • • •

The American Society for Cell Biology has a nice post about Art in science: A gateway to public engagement. Excerpt:

The traditional communication of science—through academic papers, presentations, and technical language—can create a divide between researchers and the general public. Art, however, invites people into the conversation by focusing on visual and emotional experiences rather than jargon.

• • • • •

Paige Jarreau says, “Don’t AI my science art.” Excerpt:

We’ve only recently started acknowledging professional artists, storytellers, and other creatives as critical collaborators in the science communication enterprise… and boom, AI art generators threaten to cut them out of the process. Why?

• • • • •

Graphic design nerdery

The Bearwood Parish Council has taken a beloved (?) bit of local signage that read “CHEAP PAINT INSIDE” and immortalized it into a free font called, naturally, Cheap Paint Inside.

• • • • •

Possibly the least relevant link in this list but one of the most impressive. Nicholas Rougeux documents how he recreated astronomical illustrations from 1742. And it’s a book with lavish illustrations including seven fold out sections that are meant to create a single poster. Here’s a detail of one part of one fold out.

The graphics nerd part of me is in awe. Both of the original copper engraving and the reproduction. I want to keep showing examples of the level of detail in this work, but this post is long enough already, so I encourage you to visit the original post, Making of Clavis Cælestis: A Synopsis of the Universe.

Oh, what the heck, here is the completed seven fold outs that made one poster:

The entire recreation of Clavis Cælestis is online, and colour prints are available of the poster.

• • • • •

And finally, we always love a good reuse of a poster. At the one letter social media site (*cough*Nazibar*cough*), Armin Dorri shared how his supervisor turned one of his posters into a necktie.

Thank you for joining!