Critique: Lumbar party

I want to thank Sasha Aspinall for sharing this award winning poster. Click to enlarge!

Sasha wrote (lightly edited):

I presented this poster at a back and neck pain conference in Quebec City. I’m really proud of it, and drew a lot of inspiration from your blog. I was surprised that it won best student poster, and I attribute a lot of that to the design.

I put a lot of work into the design, in particular trying to make it visually interesting since its a topic that doesn’t really lend itself easily to engaging visuals. 

I found the graphic on the top right corner on a stock image site, Because it was a vector graphic I was able to change the colours in it fairly easily. I then built the rest of the poster around that to play on the comic book style of the graphic.

Unfortunately, the first time I had it printed the printers got the margins all wrong. On the second print they got the margins correct but somehow small light green rectangles appeared within the green heading boxes, and I didn’t have time to get it reprinted a third time. I attached a pic of what it looked like once printed. 😊

Lots of good design choices here. The poster:

• Says the main conclusion in the title.
• Keeps lots of white space.
• Could be read in a few minutes.
• Directly labelled graphs. 
• Has a clearly signposted summary for someone who wants the bottom line.

I have just few things that I might have tried.

The typeface for the bulk of the text is Eras Light. This font, designed in 1976, is well known and well used. I worry that the Light weight fades out a little at a distance. 

There is a Book weight for Eras that might have been worth trying. 

 

The yellow emulates the style of classic comics. It works great in the title bar and “Final word”. But  the yellow in Figure 2 is a little too light. I might have tried a different colour that was a little higher contrast.

And because I’m a comics fan and a little picky, the word balloon at top might be a bit more effective if the pointer was aimed more at the speaker’s face than his elbow. Reminder: You can buy professionally made word balloons that are used by actual comics creators! (Links below.)

Always pleased to show the work from another satisfied customer!

External links

Comicraft word balloons

Blambot word balloons  

Grids and gestures and posters

I watched this video about comics.

I wasn’t aware of Nick Sousanis before. In his introductory remarks, he briefly describes a teaching exercise he uses called “Grids and gestures.” In a technical paper, Sousanis (2015) wrote: 

In comics, not only are we concerned with what goes on in each frame or panel, but we also need to attend to the size and shape of individual panels, their orientation, and their placement within the overall composition and relationship to other elements of the page(.)

It struck me that this is something that is so missing from thinking about conference posters, even in my own writing.

Posters, like comics, are often made with distinct panels, but makers are mostly concerned about what goes into the panels, rather than how the shape, size, and placement of the panels themselves could show information.

Here’s an example: an old Little Nemo in Slumberland page. Think about what those ever lengthening panels signify,

Or this famous page from The Amazing Spider-Man #33. 

Those four panels could be all the same size. But making that last panel so big shows that is a pivotal moment.

Poster makers can practice those layout skills using Sousanis’s grids and gestures exercise. It goes like this.

1. Take a page of paper and something to write with. The page is going to show one day. It could be today, yesterday, a memorable day, any day you want.
2. Divide the page into panels that represent parts of that day. 
3. In each panel, put something that represents the feeling of that part of the day. 

Here is just one example Sousanis got from one of his students. This shows this isn’t an exercise in drawing or technical draftsmanship.

 I think you can make some guesses about how someone’s day went.

To adapt this to a conference poster, we might ask, “What does the shape of this project to this point look like?”

Was there a long boring grind? Was there a big “A-ha!” moment? How would that look on a page like above? Can you capture some of that in the final poster?

Related posts

Put your favourite data in the spotlight 

Reference

Sousanis Nick. 2015. Grids and gestures: A comics making exercise. SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education 2(1): 8. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/vol2/iss1/8

External links

Grids and gestures

Critique: Glowing dust

Friend of the blog Natalia Asari has already shared a poster with us. But It’s been a while, so you might ask, what else has Natalia been up to? Click to enlarge! 

Natalia wrote:

This poster was for a conference which switched from being in-person to completely online. I did it in landscape mode, which is better for computer screens. In Brazil and Europe the room for posters is usually for a A0 poster in portrait format, so this is probably what it would have been were the conference held in person in an alternate timeline with no pandemic in 2020.

The colour scheme of the poster is inspired in the colour maps I used in my plots. I used Pages because, well, I am familiar with it. I tried Inkscape once, but I did not allow enough time to get it working properly and gave up. The problem with posters is that I usually make one once in a blue moon (say, once every two years), while I give talks much more often. So I have not honed my posters skills a whole lot.

In that conference, flash talks for posters should be at most 2:30 minutes, and had to be pre-recorded. Here is mine:

https://youtu.be/OsJVbKDWGu4

It took me a couple of tries to get it short. It is much more difficult than in person, but I think this is the same lesson I have learned teaching remote classes this year and organising remote meetings and supervision. 

This is a perfectly respectable poster. I would try to make the text blocks in the “less than the sum of its parts” section equally wide. Currently, the line length on the left is noticeably longer than the line length on the right.

Thanks to Natalia for sharing her online poster design and experience!

Related posts

Critique: Stellar populations 

External links

Natalia Vale Asari home page 

Critique: Bang your head

We have two posters today from contributor Nicole Ackermans! This first poster is from a Mount Sinai Annual Neuroscience Retreat. Click to enlarge!

Excellent concision in the text. This poster is about 300 words long.

This poster impresses with the simplicity of the text, which could carry over into its visuals. The background are the glowing effect on the title are making the poster look complicated when it isn’t.

The picture of the muskoxen provides an entry point for a viewer. I wish it was a bit bigger and clearer. The dark fur against the dark background reduces its impact. A white background, like the other graphs, might have helped. Here’s a quick mock-up.

Personally, I would have put all the headings in a row, rather than sometimes above, sometimes below the pictures. Consistency is helpful. Having the pictures above the text puts the graphics closer to eye level.

One thing you cannot see in the image above, though, is the very useful visual aid that went with the poster.

Skulls are cool.

Nicole’s second poster is from the Experimental Biology conference.

This poster is even shorter and sweeter than the first: only about 200 words! Much better contrast across the board, so it looks as crisp as it reads.

The only thing I question is the sideways section headings. I have come around to the point that generally you don’t want people to have to read sideways or tilt their heads if you can help it. But since each is only one word, and those words are the super familar “IMRaD” headings, it’s fine. 

Nicole assures me that posters were two to a board. She wasn’t leaving all that poster space unused!

I thank Nicole for letting me show her posters!

Critique: Got water?

Today’s contributer is Antonia Hadjimichael. She sent a pair, presented in no particular order. They were both presented at the American Geophysical Union in the same year. You can click the enlarge the first...

...Or the second!

 Antonia wrote:

I don’t get to do posters often and it was an exciting challenge!

For someone who doesn’t do posters often, she certainly rose to the challenge! What strikes me about both is that these show better than average design choices. It’s clear from the colours, and the integration of text and graphics.

Antonia did have a couple of constraints in creating these. The project’s sponsor wanted the logo on the top left and mandated the blue-green-blue banner. 

I was surprised by the word count. The first poster is about 800 words, and the second is about 700. That’s probably around average for this conference (Faulkes 2023), but because the main text is set quite small, I would have guessed the word count to be well over a thousand. I would look for places on both to reclaim space and increase text size. 

I do appreciate the effort to make the first poster more skimmable by bolding for emphasis.

Let’s continue with top poster for a minute. Antonia has tried a couple of other things to increase the readability.

 

The poster do not use the common “Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion” format, which is good. I recently wrote about the “complete assertion headings” format, and this comes very close to that style. “Regional-scale model underrepresents sub-basin variability” is a clear statement. “Modeling across scales,” though, is a fragment, and not as helpful.

Another way the poster tries to make itself more readable is by including a “Main findings” section. Excellent idea! But the “Main findings” section is too subdued visually.  

Look at the colour, weight, and case of “Main findings”: low contrast, thin stroke, sentence case.

Look at the colour, weight, and case of the other headings: high contrast, bold, and ALL CAPS.

The callout box for the “Main findings” helps, but it’s not enough. The low visibility heading and low value right corner makes this easy to overlook.

Because the section headings come close to summarizing the poster, it might be worth removing the “Main findings” section and hitting those three points in the section headings. The last section heading is the first main finding, so the task is already one third done.

Let’s go on to the second poster.

 

Like the first poster, this one has a lot of visual complexity.

The poster tries to provide signposts about the order that it is meant to be read in. It works! It works with maybe one exception. 

The placement of “This study addresses two questions” suggests it’s the second section of the poster.

But the numbered circular arrow leads to a graph, which overlaps with the callout, “This study addresses two questions.” The overlap signals that it’s part of the callout, read before you start at the number 1 end of the arrow. But being at the end of the arrow suggests the graph is to be read last.

The lower left corner is another place that has a lot going on. Methods are always one of those things that people are reluctant to cut. I appreciate the effort to convey the methodology visually, but I am not sure how much value the icons and detailed descriptions are bringing. Maybe “Use 20,000 core hours
to perform 600,000 model executions” is important, but as someone not in this space, it seems a little superfluous.

Likewise, I am not sure the SQL icon brings any more clarity than “SQL” written in the heading above it. Same goes for some of the other icons. I would try just having the headings for points 3 and 4, to clear up some space.

Thanks to Antonia for sharing her work!

Related posts

Making statements with section headings on your conference poster

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2023. The “wall of text” visual structure of academic conference posters. Frontiers in Communication 8: 1063345. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1063345
 

Link roundup for July 2025

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

• • • • •

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

• • • • •

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 

• • • • • 

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 

• • • • •

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!