Poster Presentations

Academic posters should aim to guarantee equal access to everyone, such as those people who are colorblind or visually impaired. 

• Color blind-friendly palettes - How to use color blind-friendly palettes in your design
• TPGi's free color contrast checker -  A downloadable application to optimize your content - including text and visual elements - for individuals with color blindness or low vision impairments
• WebAIM contrast checker - An online tool that can help you ensure that text will be readable.

Word Choice:

• If the poster is displayed for people familiar with your topic, using specialized terms, jargon, and a detailed depiction of your results is fine.
• However, posters intended for a more general audience should avoid jargon and stress results and application over methods and data analysis.

Font:

• Use sans-serif fonts, such as Arial, Open Sans, or Verdana for text, because sans-serif fonts are easier to read in smaller sizes.
• For size, everything should be legible from three feet away.
• Avoid underlining text, which crowds spacing. Use bold or italics instead. 

Length:

• Remember to keep the text below 800 words.
• Using active voice helps cut down on sentence length. 

Source: TAMU Writing Center

There are several ways to convey messages visually.

• The easiest forms to read are listed in the top row from left to right, starting with a single number in text.
• Harder to read are pie charts (with more than 3 sections) and heat maps.
• Scatterplots indicating relationships are the hardest for a general audience to comprehend. 

Determine which type of visuals will best present the message to the intended audience. 

Decide your purpose and choose your visual: 

• Visualizations that focus on ANALYSIS should provide a simple visual explanation of your statistical data. Who just wants the numbers and a simple visual feature (like a bar graph) to tell the story? 

• Visualizations that focus on UNDERSTANDING should include a reference range, benchmark, or indicator to bring more meaning to the visualization. These can be helpful for folks who want to see the opportunity for action in the story — they want to see a measure or target associated with the numbers.

• Infographics and other visualizations intended to PERSUADE your audience are a great place to include narrative data, such as from interviews. For example, using an anonymized quote alongside numerical data can help make that data more emotionally impactful. Visualizations like these are also great supplements to complex data presentations and help policy-makers and other decision-makers relate better to the information. 

     OR 

Source: Visualizing Data Stories from the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice

Refine Visuals for Clarity and Impact

• Eliminate unnecessary gridlines and background shading from charts and tables.
• Use a clean, flat design with solid colors.
• Emphasize key data points through contrasting, bolding, or color highlights.

The "Before" image lacks visual focus and fails to guide the viewer toward any specific metric.

The "After" image intentionally draws attention to the most important data by using a clear title and visual cues, such as color and layout.

The "Before" image includes a distracting-colored background, cluttered grid lines, and an uninformative title that does not tell viewers the outbreak disease.

The "After" image improves clarity by using a clean background, a specific and informative title, tilted labels for better spacing, and red bars to highlight deaths, making key data stand out.

Source: Northwest Center for Public Health Visually Communicating Public Health Data