Making a good poster

I might develop this blog post a bit more in the future, however for now here are three posters I've made over the years which employ a few key techniques I learned from attending some poster training during my PhD. For each powerpoint file, the first slide is the poster itself and then the second slide contains a breakdown of the techniques used in the poster / general poster advice. I would recommend going through them in numerical order as I wrote the advice to follow on from each other in that order.

Main techniques I talk about in the powerpoint files:

1. The 'hook' -- you need something to 'stand out' amongst all the other posters and to 'hook' people who are wondering around to your poster - what is going to make them want to come and look at your poster?

2. 'Flow' -- it's easy for readers to get confused how to 'move' through posters -- they might read one section, then not know what's next, and so give up and walk away -- the posters demonstrate a few ways to make your flow super clear.

3. 'Pacing' and attention -- even if you've hooked them, and they know how to read your poster, you need to keep things interesting and maintain their attention all the way to the end -- generally the big no no is large walls of text -- you want nice clear diagrams (that doesn't mean fancy ones that no one can interpret), lots of thought going into your writing to make it as concise and clear as possible, and a bunch of other tricks you'll see in the examples!