How to create an award-winning academic poster in simple steps.

In this article, we explore the importance of scientific communication for conference posters and look at some examples of posters. We will create a recipe to follow for creating a compelling and appealing scientific poster.

As scientists, we get to communicate our science very often, be it at conferences, meetings, or in the form of scientific papers, reports, book chapters and thesis. However, often a scientific education does not include any training in communication. It is simply a skill that we are expected to acquire on the job! Investing effort in communicating well will have tangible results for you: it will attract more people to your work, you will have the chance to discuss with a larger pool of scientists and expand your network and knowledge! I believe that communication skills are essential to any scientist.

In this article, we will focus on one form of communication, the Poster. During my Ph.D. in Quantum Computing, I took part in plenty of conferences and created many posters. Below we will analyze my personal learning experience, which culminated with winning 2 poster prizes at the last couple of conferences I attended. An important thing to remember is that nobody starts out knowing how to make a great poster, and the more posters we create and present, the more we will improve! Practice does make perfect ..

The journey starts just a couple of months after the beginning of my Ph.D., when I took part in a 3-day event for junior doctoral students. Below is the poster I created for that event:

Poster created by the author for a junior doctoral students event, about 4 months after the start of her Ph.D.

Let’s take a look at what is done well and what is done not so well in this case. We should always keep in mind that a good poster communicates the science by itself, i.e. without the need of the author next to it explaining it. It should function well as a stand-alone. Here is a list of questions that we can ask ourselves when looking at (and when creating) a poster:

1. Is the title clear, does it immediately communicate the main topic of the poster?

2. Is the main message of the poster immediately clear? Can you answer: “What is the goal of this work” within the first minute of looking at the poster?