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!

Presenting to a pigeon

 

In big convention centers, it’s not unusual to find an interloper. Ben Filio wrote:

You’ve heard of presenting your research to a general audience now get ready for… pigeon #sfn2024

Little did he know.

 

The photo is a screenshot I spotted from Doc Becca on Instagram, but I think the original “presenting to a pigeon” video might be from Jiaxin Cindy Tu. Watch with sound up!

Additional, October 14, 2024: The presenter has been identified! 

Thanks to Billy Wade, an undergraduate with Dr. Stephanie Grella at Loyola Chicago. Thank you, Billy, for giving us something to smile about!

Record your presentation and listen to yourself

I’ve been fortunate that in the last couple of years, I was invited to do some podcasts. I listened back to each of them afterwards.

Yup, it was not fun. I became more aware of some of my speech patterns. Some I knew. Tendency towards tangents: check! But some were new. I would often pause in mid-sentence while I tried to work out how to end the sentence. I didn’t know I did that before.

You might not be able to get yourself invited to a podcast, but you probably have a smart phone, and it probably has an app like “Voice memos” or something similar.

So before you present your poster at the conference, turn on the voice recorder while you are talking through your poster. Give that 3-4 minute summary out loud while you are looking at your poster.

I know, I know. Few people like to hear the sound of their own voice played back to them. It sounds weird and unfamiliar, even though you know it’s what you just said.

But in a noisy environment where people only want to spend a few minutes with you at your poster, you want to deliver a crisp walk through if you’re asked.

You are not “too good” to give a poster

Recently, Franck Marchis wrote:

Received an email from a senior scientist (over 65 years) suggesting he might skip a prominent international conference if given a poster presentation. The sense of entitlement was palpable.

Posters are not just for early career researchers. And if you ever think you don’t want to do a poster because you are just beyond that point now... please check your ego.

Case in point.

This is from the 2016 Nueroscience meeting, and the gentelman presenting the poster is John O’Keefe. For those of you not in the neurobiz, he won a Nobel prize in medicine or physiology a little less than two years before this picture was taken.

  Picture by Lucie Low.

And lest you think this was some weird, on off event... no! It was not! Here is O’Keefe again just last year:

Picture by Timothy Bredy.

I don’t know how I missed these.

External links

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 press release

Can you give the same poster twice? And should you?

Don’t let the “Twitter is dying” talk stop you, there are still many valuable discussions on the bird site!

Luisa Turbino Torres asked if people thought it was okay to present the same poster twice at conferences.

People had... opinions. They ranged close to a full 180­° from, “Sure, totally okay” to “That’s misconduct!”

Turbino Torres summarized the responses in this thread. Here is an edited excerpt:

Short answer: it depends.

Social sciences use conferences to workshop ideas in different stages. Other fields present ready-to-publish research (that is often officially published in conference proceedings).

If you present something that is in progress, as long as there is progress (i.e., posters are similar, not identical. - ZF), it should be okay to present at another one. But if you present a final draft that just needs a few tweaks before publishing, it seems less productive.

It is not a bad idea to present (a poster) in more than one space because you are making your work known and disseminating it to different audiences. If you do interdisciplinary work, it seems okay and desirable to present to different audiences.

(But) maybe don’t present the exact same abstract at the exact same conference in a consecutive year. Some conferences ask you not have presented the same abstract previously (emphasis added). 

Some institutions and organizations might not fund the same abstract twice. But they might only check the title or actually check the abstract, it depends on the institution.

The best advice I got from this from Keith Schnakenberg: “You should keep presenting the same paper until the comments are almost all predictable and then you can submit the paper.”

TL;DR: Familiarize yourself with the unspoken rules of your discipline and department / institution (by asking a mentor or advisor, for example), but do not be too attached to them.

I discuss this in the Better Posters book. Chapter 25 begins with a short section on “Encore presentations” (pages 248-249). I wrote that reusing the exact same identical poster is not ideal. It’s good to be up front about it if you do.

Since we are coming up on the holiday season, this is a good time for me to remind you that the Better Posters book makes a great addition to your wishlist or your giving list!

The TikTok test for poster talks

Try making a TikTok video of yourself presenting your poster. It doesn’t matter if the poster isn’t done yet. This is purely a tool for you, so it’s okay.

TikTok, the world’s most popular website, now lets people upload videos up to ten minutes long.

Most people want to spend about five minutes at a poster.

So if you couldn’t walk through your poster in one TikTok video, you’re talking too much. Way too much. You’ve either:

1. Got too much stuff (likely) or,
2. Not rehearsed your presentation of the poster enough.

“Rage quit” and poster designs

In an upcoming interview for the Scholarly Communications podcast, I was reminded of an argument I made in the Better Posters book about relevance.

What someone thinks is “relevant” to them isn’t fixed, but varies.

But I didn’t have an example in the book, so here’s a concrete example of this principle. It’s a well known phenomenon among video game players: the rage quit.

When someone starts playing a video game, you have to think that they are pretty invested in that process. Games are expensive, complex, and take a long time to complete. Players want to work through the game.

Some people try a game, decide quickly that this isn’t for them, and stop.

But many players invest a lot of time playing the game. Then, they reach a point where the game suddenly gets harder. A lot harder.

Players know that games are not supposed to be easy. Part of the fun is overcoming challenges and obstacles. But there is a big difference between feeling, “This is hard” and “This is impossible.”

When players feel it is impossible to continue in the game, they’ll quit. And this is rarely a detached, emotional decision of, “I have reached my peak skill level, therefore it is pointless to continue.” No, that decision comes after long hours of frustration, trying to do the same thing repeatedly and failing. 

So when people quit, they don’t go quietly. They are full on mad.

That’s a rage quit. (There are compilations of these moments on YouTube if you have a few minutes to kill watching other people be mad. Which can be strangely satisfying to watch.)

Even someone who is deeply motivated to do something like understand the scientific or academic content of your poster, will only take so much frustration. Everyone has a limit.

So making your poster easier for a reader, faster to grasp, more accessible, is going to help more viewers find your work relevant to them.

P.S.—If you have never completed a big adventure video game that takes dozens of hours... let me tell you, you’re missing out. It’s a very satisfying feeling of achievement.

Three things are at the core of good science communication

Very interesting report here about science communication. It tried to develop a scheme to asses what makes for good science communication, and came up with this summary diagram.

The three key elements for successful scientific communication are (slightly paraphrased):

1. Trust.
2. Style.
3. Relevance.
   

Most of these principles are applicable to communication between scientists, not just from scientists to non-scientists. 

To think about this in terms of conference posters:

Professional societies are usually going to trust other members (even students) by default. You have a leg up there.

Style... well, that’s why this blog exists. Many people struggle with style, but it is a solvable problem that you can address if you learn some basic skills.

For a conference setting, I suggest one tweak to the principle of connection (or relevance, as I called it above). I would rephrase “Connection with the society” as  “Connection with community.” 

“Society” is too big and nebulous. “Community” is smaller and more manageable. In particular, when trying to communicate with other scientists, you should be thinking about “Connection with your research community.”

Lots of posters (and presentations and papers) fail to gain an audience not because the science is bad, but because they don’t address the ongoing discussion within the community.

For example, if you are in a biomedical research community with a few well-studied model organisms, you are going to face a big uphill battle if your project is using a non-standard organism. 

For example, if there is some ongoing controversy in your field, you are going to have an easy time attracting an audience if your project addresses that controversy. In the last year, it was easy to get eyeballs on a scientific paper: just make sure it was about COVID-19 in some way.

And while talking about the importance of understanding your community:

From here.

Hat tip to Jordan Pennells. 

External links

How to improve science communication? Consider these 12 guiding principles

Lessons from battle scenes: It’s all about the build-up

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers features a fantastic battle scene: the battle for Helm’s Deep. There’s a lot of reasons why it works. The scale and physicality of it is awesome. But there is one factor that is underrated.

In the DVD commentary, director Peter Jackson talked about watching famous sieges and battles of film, like Zulu. He said that what he learned from those was that the secret was all in the build-up.

The movie spends a lot of time making sure that the audience understands the situation. The fortress is literally set against a mountain, creating the impression of “backs against the wall.” The city is outnumbered, with hundreds of defenders against thousands of attackers. 

And you see that army of thousands marching in. Not doing anything at first. Just standing there. Then thumping their spears and yelling.

More waiting.

And then the army charges and all hell breaks loose and it is on. And when those orc charge and start throwing ladders up against the fortress walls, you are invested and ready to see what happens next.

The battle itself is only about ten minutes of film. It would have been easy to not show the orcs doing their “haka” and charge into the action, particularly in a movie that asks you to stay in your seat as long as the Lord of the Rings films do.

On a poster, the Results section is like the action part of the battle, when arrows are flying, axes are wielded, and explosions are going off. Too many poster makers want to charge into the action. Many poster presenters want to get to the stuff they find exciting as soon as possible.
 
But an audience member has to care. They need the set up. They need to know what the stakes are. They need to know the landscape the project is set in.

That means you should spend a lot of time thinking about the first part of your poster. This is important both in the design of your poster, and how you are going to talk about your poster. How are you going to bring someone who has never thought about your subject on board and interested in the outcome?

By telling them what the conflict is. By telling them the complication you are trying to solve. By setting up a scenario, then throwing in a “But...” moment. You have to be crystal clear in that introduction. If you can do that, people will follow you through the battle to see the resolution.

External links

15 years later, no one’s matched LOTR’s Battle at Helm’s Deep

Poster sessions are not singles bars

Today in, “Things I should not have to say.”

A poster session is a place for exchange of scientific and technical information between professional adults. It is not a place for you to hit on people for a hook up or booty call.

Beth Ann McLaughlin asked:

Women of STEM,
Quick question
At any given science poster presentation, what percent of the time do you have a man at your poster who just won't go away and makes you uncomfortable?

Results? 16% of women said every conference, 14% said 50-99% of them, 19% said 25-49% of them, and 51% of respondents said less than 25% of them.

Now, sure I could niggle about the poll is structured might inflate perceptions of how common this is (there’s an option for 100%, but not 0%, so the most common situation could be women not getting bothered), but even if every one of that 51% was really never, that still means that half of women poster presenters had a bad experience. And that’s unacceptable.

And reading the replies to that poll is not fun. (Some tweets lightly edited.)

Bryony Hockin describes:

(A) PhD student who comes to my poster at every single local conference for 30+ minutes, putting off everyone else and freaking me out. Some of his highlights include, “I like your dress.” I now get male friends to look out for him and warn me.

Kimberly Harrison says:

My fav was the time the fella didn’t ask any questions about my work, but did let me know he saw me swimming at the hotel pool earlier.

kss wrote:

I have been hit on at my poster, asked on countless dates, and even followed after a session when I went to a bar to meet up with friend.

Sarah MacNamee wrote:

(A) guy spent 10+ min at poster, complimented work, asked if he could call me. My reply: “Uhh, email is the preferred method of contact.” Looked down and was alarmed to see my number going into his phone - he lifted it from my poster tube’s “If found call” info.

Meaghan Creed wrote:

First SfN had a significantly older guy spend half an hour at my poster, no background in my field (i.e., asked what the words in the title meant, and what the differences between flies and rodents are). Kept touching my back/shoulder and would not move on until he took a photo with me. Still... bleh.

Sarah Sheffield wrote:

Yeesh. Happened to me once, long time ago. Called me sweetheart, while trying to show me he knew more about stats than me. Leered for an excessive amount of time. Blegh.

The thread exposes other problems besides people trying to get a date, too. Tara Levin wrote:

More common poster-related sexism for me: I go to someone's poster and ask a question, but am 1) ignored or 2) the presenter directs the answer to my question to the man standing next to me

Angela Tringali was not alone in this sentiment:

I gave a poster presentation once as a new grad student 10 years ago and haven’t done one since. Never again.

Florentina Tofoleanu wrote:

It happened enough times that I chose what conferences to go to depending on whether I got a talk, presenting a poster was not an option.

This makes me sad and angry. I love poster sessions. As I’ve written before, I think they are the true beating heart of a scientific conference. It’s frustrating that something that has been so rewarding for me personally is an experience that has driven others away.

Finally:

Men in Science,

Over 1100 women in STEM reported that they have been made to feel uncomfortable by a man who won't leave their poster 25%-100% of the time they present.

16% of women say this happens to them at every conference.

What are you going to do about it?

Conference organizers: Make sure you have a code of conduct. I’ve seen the adoption and refinement process of this first hand in the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. I know it’s a lot for a small conference to do, but templates exist out there.

I am seriously wondering if conference organizers should have poster session bouncers.

I think I have only seen visible security at the biggest meetings I have been at. Maybe conference organizers need to put more thought into asking what venue security there is, and advertising that fact more widely to conference attendees.

Faculty supervisors: You are responsible for the well bring and professional experience of your students. Don’t send new students to a poster session without a plan. Make sure the poster presenter has a contact number of people they can text if they want someone to come support them. There might be posters you want to see or people you want to talk to or grants you want to write back in your room, but make sure that you are in the poster hall when your student is and check in on them occasionally.

Check in with your students and walk by their poster regularly if you are not co-presenting it with your students. Ask your students if they want you to take over presenting the poster. Beth Ann McLaughlin recommends having a code for trouble, like asking the poster presenter if they need a red Sharpie. If they say yes, they want help.

If you are not able to go to the conference, at least talk to your students who are going. Make sure they are aware before they head to the conference. You, as supervisor, might know someone else going to the conference who can act as a “conference buddy.”

Be willing to call this crappy behaviour out for what it is, as McLaughlin does:

Physically get between the woman and the man, get his name off his badge and say, “Hey . I see you’re at UW. You’ve been here awhile. What do you need?” Smile. If he says they are “just chatting,” I’ll next level it. “Let’s not creep on my student. She’s working.”

Fellow post session attendees: Two things. First, look out for other presenters. Suzy Styles wrote:

If you see a presenter looking blocked or trapped, join the conversation to give them an ‘out.’

Second.

Don’t be that guy.

Nobody likes that guy.

Additional, 24 August 2018: Perhaps because I chose the “singles bar” metaphor in the title, several people on Twitter suggested that having alcohol during poster sessions contributed to harassment. I’m not a drinker myself, and have commented to some of the societies I belong to about boasting about alcohol consumption, but I think it makes about as much sense to blame alcohol for harassment as as it does to blame Ambien for racism.

I suspect conferences are problematic partially because people are outside their normal social spheres. They can convince themselves that, “What happens at the conference, stays at the conference.” They are away from people who might normally see their bad behaviour, and think they can act without repercussions.

McLaughlin’s poll was directed at women who had bad experiences with men, which are undoubtedly the most common problem. But it’s important to talk about these issues with everyone. Men and women. Presenters and attendees. This shouldn’t be a situation where men and women get different advice (i.e., women are told how to protect themselves and men are told to keep their hands to themselves). Discomfort isn’t just caused by someone doing something sexual or creepy. It can be someone who just won’t shut up or go away. Presenters who are men can be made uncomfortable by people who are trying to intimidate or bully them. Every poster presenter should feel someone has their back if they need it.

Similarly, supervisors should talk to all their students about being a good audience member at poster and how to avoid making someone feel uncomfortable. For example, at international conferences, people from different cultures may well have different expectations and habits about professional interactions and personal space. Some cultures are more comfortable with a handshake or “air kiss” than others.

Link round-up for December 2017

One of the problems with free fonts is that they often don’t have special characters that are necessary for proper display of characters from other languages, or symbols.

Google Noto is a series of fonts meant to have almost every character (and emoji!) in as many languages as possible. When I scrolled down the list and saw, “Canadian aboriginal,” I knew they were serious.

I downloaded Noto Sans, and was impressed.

Not only are there over 30 variations of Noto Sans, including thin, bold, condensed, extended, and combinations thereof, going into “Insert symbol” to see the individual characters is eye-opening. You think you’re a typographic sophisticate for recognizing and using an interrobang? Noto has that, and an inverted interrobang. There are combinations of letters and accents and umlauts and currency symbols I have never seen before.

The range of options is, frankly, staggering. There is no font package that comes Windows standard with this many options. Buying a font package with this many options would usually cost you many hundreds of dollars.

And Noto fonts are all free.

You have no excuse to use a lower case letter x in place of a multiplication sign, or not put an accent in a co-author's name, ever again.

Hat tip to Robert J. Sawyer.

• • • • •

Asada and colleagues have a new paper reviewing effective graphs, particularly in the are of public health. They’re very big into dot charts. I’m not convinced by their representation of variation in dot charts, though.

Hat tip to Hilda Bastian.

• • • • •

Another hat tip to Hilda for spotting a timeline of data visualizations and graphs.

• • • • •

Tony Roepke has good advice:

Note to poster presenters...don’t go out for a cigarette break right before your poster session.

How many people will show up at your poster?

This Twitter thread by Laura Williams about poster presentations began:

83% expect 10 or fewer poster visitors at large meeting.

This reminded me of an unfinished project: a formula to estimate how many people you could expect at your poster.

This is how far I got:

My efforts were inspired by the Drake equation. The attendance at the meeting (N_r for number ) is the maximum possible number of people who can see your poster (V for viewers). Most of the rest of the terms in the equation are fractions that reduce attendance at your poster.

Looking back on this was, my favourite factor in this equation (mid right) was, “f_c = fraction (of attendees) more interested in coffee (than your poster).” And the postscript to that still makes me smile: “GEOLOGY f_b = beer.”

Geologists do love their beer, I’ve heard.

Lurkers and claques

Most of the readers of this blog are lurkers. They read, but they don’t feel obliged to make a comment, or send me a tweet, or email, or anything else. And that’s fine. I’m a lurker in many online spaces.

Some poster viewers are lurkers, too. They will see your poster during the poster session, and they are interested, but they will not approach you. Instead, they will often wait until you are giving a tour of your poster to someone else. Then, and only then, will they walk up and casually listen over the shoulder of the person you are mostly talking to.

I only learned about this during the last #SciFund Challenge poster class. Several of the class participants admitted that this was their poster viewing strategy. It’s understandable. Not everyone is comfortable walking up cold to someone they’ve never met before, and saying, “What’s to learn here?” (This is usually one of the first things I say to a poster presenter.)

What can you, as a poster presenter, do to reach out to the lurkers? First, be aware of your surroundings. Keep an eye out for someone on the edges, listening over the shoulder. If you see that person, make an effort to turn to them, engage them in conversation. Say something like, “This is my poster. Please let me know if I can answer questions. Or would you like a run through?”

But I have an even more cunning plan.

At a play one time, I was talking to one of the crew about how different the play felt depending on the mood of the audience. A big, enthused audience made so much difference. I commented, in what I thought was a joke, “It almost makes you want to hire people to show up, sit in the audience, and applaud.”

“Oh, they do,” she replied matter of factly. “It’s called a claque.”

Instead of waiting for people to walk up to your poster, find yourself a claque. You don’t need a big claque; you probably only need one person. You don’t need your claque to cheer and applaud, but just someone who is clearly listening to an explanation of the poster. Have that person at your poster to give the lurkers someone to eavesdrop on.

Your listener might be someone you know from your department, but not your lab. Ask someone you met earlier at the conference if they can come by your poster. Get your boyfriend or girlfriend or best friend to hear the tour of your poster a few extra times.

While posters are supposed to be “social objects” to facilitate conversations, having people around can act as an even more powerful social cue. If someone else is already there, it lowers the barrier for everyone else to walk up.

Plus, nothing succeeds like success. If people see a lot of viewers at a poster, they’re all the more likely to be curious to see what the poster is about.

Statue pic from here.

Link roundup for April 2016

Lisa Rost has a nice overview of colour tools to help with data visualizations. Some have appeared on the blog before, but this is a great summary.

MarkMaker bills itself as an automated logo designer (backstory here). It’s fun to look at, but I was unimpressed with the first suggestions:

I stayed with it, trying a few favourites and deleting ones I didn’t like. I was still baffled by this suggestion after a few rounds:

I suppose it might have a certain utility in getting you out of ruts, but I’m not convinced it has much more utility than randomly picking fonts in your graphics editor. Hat tip to Doctor Becca.

DrugMonkey reports from the floor of the joint American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics Experimental Biology meeting:

Saw a poster with Supplemental Materials today at #aspet #expbio #eb2016 – this is where we are people.

I... wait... what? As Clay Clark asked:

On back side of the poster?

Let me make this clear:

That’s dumb. Do not do that.

We hear about viral images on the internet, but most don’t look this amazing. Even if they didn’t move, they would still be stunning scientific visualizations.

Worst poster viewer

“I don’t have a question so much as a comment...”

Dave Levitan at Slate looks at the phenomenon of why people use question time at the end of presentations to not ask questions.

 “My question is the following statement” is the bane of any sane conference-goer’s existence. Any conference, panel, lecture, seminar, symposium, and so on, in any possible field you can imagine, can be the setting for this crime against humanity. The tendency of audience members to stand up and speechify rather than simply ask is remarkably widespread — anecdotally, everyone I know says they see it all the time, and everyone says they hate it.

There’s no single, simple answer why people do this, but it got me wondering: is there an equivalent behaviour in a poster session?

Oral presentations are designed to be a one time spiel by one speaker to many audience members, but a poster is designed to be shown many times to a small audience that comes and goes. An oral talk rarely offers the the opportunity for dialogue that a poster presentation does.

But in both formats, some audience members who will listen quietly while the presenter speaks. A few will interject questions as the talk goes along.

I can’t remember any time in a poster presentation where someone who I did not know wandered up to my poster and just made statements about unrelated things that had nothing to do with the poster.

I do realize, however, that my experience is limited. I’m a pretty tall, old guy, which can have the effect of filtering out a lot of interactions from other conference goers.

Has anyone encountered the “My question is the following statement” behaviour at a poster presentation? If not, what is the most annoying thing that a poster viewer has done to you in a poster presentation?

I think mine might be the poster viewer who just won’t leave.

Update: Here are answers to #WorstPosterViewer from Twitter.

External links

My Question Is the Following Statement

Make this your working title for every poster

When you’re laying out your poster, instead of typing in the title you put in your abstract, put this:

“No one has to read this crap.”

Frame grab from this interview with Ed Yong. Ed has this posted above his desk as advice for freelancers, but the advice is equally appropriate for poster makers.

Nobody owes your their time at a conference. Nobody has to stop at your poster. Nobody has to talk to you.

Let that harsh realization guide your editing and design to make something that another person, who is not you, who is not invested in the project, wants to read.

Update, 1 October 2015: This quote apparently originated with Tim Radford. (Radford’s rule #6.)

Are posters a visual aid, or a stand alone document?

Jason McDermott has an excellent question:

SciTweeps - which camp are you in? The A) “poster as a visual aid to a presentation w/minimal text” or B) “poster as a complete manuscript”?

There are some definition issues here. When I hear “manuscript,” I think that implies a journal article. That, to my mind, is way too detailed and too much stuff. A poster is not be a journal article and should not necessarily follow its conventions.

The other part of option B, though, is “complete.” As I’ve said before, a poster should be self-contained. It should present a complete narrative that does not need a speaker to guide you through it or explain it. A poster should be more than just a billboard or decoration; a poster should have substance.

I am intrigued by the responses. Most responses favoured minimalism.

I prefer (A), but there should be enough text for the reader to understand the results without you being there - Kelsey Wood

A, always A - Auriel Fournier ‏

A. Always! That's the difference between a poster and a journal article. Posters are for work in progress. Publish once done - Matthias Lein ‏

The contrary point of view is interesting, though:

I don’t want your song-and-dance routine, I want your data; plus, what if you're not there when I am? - Bill Hooker

90% A, 10% B. (Some things really need text.) - Chemjobber

Depends on venue. If you never leave poster, A. Otherwise, needs enough B for people to critically evaluate. - Peter Thompson

Noah wanted to dig deeper:

Can’t we split the difference? C) "poster as cues to provoke interesting questions, answer boring ones."

And from there the conversation went all Game of Thrones:

We already suffer about as much carnage as G.R.R. Martin’s characters - and about as much job security. - Jason McDermott

“The red conference” - noah ‏

Book 1: “A trial of tenure.” Book 2: “A lack of funding” - Francois Gould ‏

Related posts

Containment

Picture by char booth on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Don’t get mad, get playful

Most people want to give talks at conferences instead of posters. David Schulz was denied the opportunity to give a talk, he was mad. His anger drove him to “go there” in poster design – and the result was a roaring success.

Let’s break it down and look at some of the elements that gave him such success.

First, he has balloons. Balloons! Not only does looking at them make you reflexively smile, they act like a highway sign for his poster. The balloons will be visible from almost anywhere in the poster hall, rising above the horizon. People will see them and wonder what they’re for, and might wander over to have a peek.

When they get there, the viewer is invited to play a little game:

You can get the answer by lifting the flaps. It’s very hard to resist interacting with the poster now, because it almost captures some of the feel of a pop-up book. I’ve shown a few examples of other “pop up” panels and flipbooks, and this falls into that category.

The answers are also written on the handouts that David has on the table. This encourages people to pick them up, and makes them more likely to take them away, which means more connections between David and the people who saw his poster.

Looking at David’s set-up, I would have liked his poster to be bigger and use more of the available space. I also might have gone for a more subdued colour scheme. But this poster is so good at saying, “Hey! You! Yes, you! Come over here and look at me!” that it clearly overcame some of the weaker elements of its design.

At the end, David said:

(I)t was one of the most engaging scientific activities I had ever done. Given that the average attendance at any given session was less than 100 people (and usually 30-50 people), I received more substantive feedback from people during the poster than the one or two polite questions I would have received had I given an oral presentation. I gave out nearly all my handouts, which meant that I directly interacted with at least as many as would have likely sat passively through an oral presentation.

Never lose sight of what a poster is for. It’s a conversation starter. And this poster did that job admirably.

David’s blog, Eloquent Science, has many other posts about conference posters that I’m just starting to dig into.

Related posts

How to show a dung beetle running
Critique: plague

External links

Rethinking Poster Sessions as Second-Class
Proof that a poster can be attractive to an audience

Hang ‘em high

Earlier this year, I wrote about a conference with one of the worst poster session layouts ever: one on top of the other, with the bottom one at crotch level.

Sadly, nobody at my own institution read this, or took the wrong lesson from it:

Posters upon posters, with the top ones so far above eye level as to be almost unreadable. Sigh.

Related posts

Hung low

Link roundup for November 2013

I’ve featured posters from Michael Barton here and here. Here’s another great description of his process, and the result is this nice poster he did last year. (Hat tip to Sam Evans.)

ScientifFig claims to produce publication ready figures. We’ll see.

Holly Bik looks at dress style. While she frames it in the context of job interviews, it can also apply to times when you're giving a poster presentation.

Peter Tennant has evidence about what going to a conference can do for you. Correlation is not causation, but still...

The Neuroscience conference is the biggest congregation of posters in the world, so here are selected tweets:

Nicky Pentilla ponders travel:

Shoe test for #SfN13: Can I walk the poster floor in them without wincing by the end?

As does Kristen Delevich:

Must stop using my poster tube as a walking stick.

Ed Wilson, Jr., reminds us that you’re there to present, not talk.

It’s incredibly frustrating when presenting author socializes rather than being avail to discuss work during poster session.

Similarly, Taking a Cat Apart asks that you not drop names.

Dude, you really don’t need all the name dropping when you talk me through your poster. It’s cool by itself. Relax.

Phat Ma notes that you should also ask about what isn’t shown on a poster:

I usually get more value from talking to people about the data they aren't showing than from the graphs on the poster.

Drug Monkey has a handout tip:

If you don't have page sized copies of your #SFN13 poster to hand out you are screwing up.

Still, one might go too far. Felipe Gerhard saw an optimistic presenter:

Saw somebody having approximately 500 printed hand-outs of his poster.

Valerie Thompson has presentation advice:

Ask visitors how familiar they are with your work before launching into your spiel, and adjust accordingly.

Unfortunately, Doc Becca found presenters who hadn’t taken heed of Valerie’s advice. Remember, presenters, to get to the point!

Poster spiel in 2 min or my brain starts to drift. Figure it out, folks.

Adam Calhoun reminds you all to show up to your session!

Worm community you’re letting me down! I went to three C. elegans posters this afternoon, and one had no presenter while other two posters totally missing!

This might be music to the ears of Bob Graybeard, who indulges in imposteration:

Sometimes I'll pick an unattended #SfN13 poster at random and present the shit out of it, just to prove I can.

And not being by your poster that could be a bad movie if My T CHondria is around; if you're not by your poster:

If you aren't standing by your poster, I'll assume you want me to just leave my comments on it with Sharpie.