The Grey Lit Café
The Grey Lit Café
Physical aspects of poster presentations (GM1 comms)
If you're studying on the University of Cambridge's Multidisciplinary Design course, this episode is for you.
The episode focuses on the (quite radical) implications of
- the context of poster display
- spectators' behaviour
- aspects of inclusive practice.
These considerations will help you to optimise the communicative effectiveness of your poster presentation.
Contents
- 00:00 Key issues
- 03:29 Allocation of space on the poster
- 04:43 Non-linear sequencing
- 07:40 Inclusiveness
Credit: The music, from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, is courtesy of the US Marine Band.
About the publisher
This episode is published by Frontinus Ltd. We're a communications consultancy that helps organisations and individuals to communicate scientific, professional, and technical content to non-specialist audiences.
We provide
- consultancy
- mentoring
- editing and writing
- training
and work on presentations, bids and proposals, and publications (for example, reports and papers).
To learn more about services or explore ways of working together, please contact us via our website, http://frontinus.org.uk/.
Hello and welcome to this, our second episode on poster presentations. My name is Bart and I'm going to be your host today and with me I have Anthony Haynes who is Creative Director of Frontinus Limited. So welcome Anthony.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you Bart.
SPEAKER_00:So in this episode we're going to discuss something that you term the physicality of poster presentations now this sounds like a fascinating title to me and somewhat enigmatic so could you please expand on exactly what you mean by this
SPEAKER_01:the best way to think about this is to consider uh there's a conference or something of that kind and there's a room with all the posters up and then observe what people do how do they move around the room that's the first question and the second question is What do they do with their bodies whilst they're looking in the poster room? There are certain things they tend not to do. So they tend not to go up close to each poster. They will tend to walk around the room at some distance from the posters themselves. And then they might select certain posters that they go up and look at in more detail. The other thing they tend not to do is if there's material towards the bottom of the poster, they tend not to flex their knees or bend over in order to access that information. They might do it for one or two posters and then they think, oh, this is a bit too tiring for me.
SPEAKER_00:So presumably these observations actually have an impact on how we design a poster, don't they? So what are the key implications that you would say that result from this?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think the first thing is to make sure that your poster is decodable from a distance. And this is actually very difficult to do if you're just working from a laptop or something. It's very misleading. A poster can look wonderful on a laptop and actually just doesn't work in the physical context. There is a rule of thumb, and I don't know whether this is actually based on empirical evidence or not, but it kind of seems to work pretty well, that you should use a minimum of font size of 36 for headings on your poster and of 18 for body text. And if you use those, there's a chance that they'll be legible. And also... There's a bonus there, which is because they're a reasonable size font, they prevent you trying to put too much on the poster. And the biggest problem we have with posters is people cramming masses of information on. So it kind of keeps you in check.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, what you say resonates so strongly, having wandered around poster presentations in the past and usually been cringing quite substantially when I see the essay on a poster.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's interesting. I helped a person producing a post for an exhibition at the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge and she was very receptive because I kept saying no take more information out take more information out keep it minimal and she produced a poster which had far less writing on than other people in the room except for one other poster which had the fewest words in the room and my student won the silver prize and the person who won the gold prize was the person that had fewer words and I thought there's a real message for everyone there
SPEAKER_00:no absolutely so presumably there are also other implications that result from the way in which people interact with posters and presenters at conferences could you outline some of those for us please
SPEAKER_01:i think there's a massive implication to do with how you use space how you allocate space on the poster so because people don't sort of flex their knees and bend over a lot i think you have to put the most important stuff at the height which is most most comfortable for most people. If I say eye height, we'll perhaps come to that later, that's not an unproblematic concept, but you kind of know what I mean for now. And so I think there what you do is decide what the story is, what's the important story, and you put that at what I'm going to call eye height, or certainly let's put it less controversially, you put it in the top half of the poster, because that's the bit that's actually going to be read. And then what you do is put all the stuff that doesn't matter, the boring but necessary stuff. You know, we'd like to thank such and such a research council for funding. And, you know, we'd like to thank my supervisor, even though I can't stand him and all the rest of it. That can all go. It all has to be there, but you can put that at the bottom.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes. Now,
SPEAKER_01:one of the consequences of that, of course, is that you end up using a nonlinear sequence. So let me explain what I mean. Most people will put their conclusion of the post in the bottom right because what they're doing is using a linear structure as you would in an essay or a journal paper. And it's sort of introduction, methodology, maybe lit review, I don't know, results, implications or something. Well, no one's going to read your conclusion if it's in the bottom right-hand corner. So you have to think. Now, if it's really part of a story, then put it at this, what I'm calling eye height or in the top half of the post and what that means is so if your methodology isn't particularly interesting we'll put it in the bottom left probably no one's going to read it but It doesn't really matter, does it? You're trying to tell an interesting story. So people are a bit resistant to this, but I think actually to optimize the communication, you need to abandon the sort of linear assumption in how you tell the story.
SPEAKER_00:That's really interesting what you say about linearity, because I think that conceptually probably comes almost out of habit, doesn't it? Because people are used to telling maybe a story in a journal or a thesis where you've got different different pages and one page follows another and that almost forces the story to be told linearly but with a poster you've got everything that you want to tell right in front of you and so the eye can quite easily hop around from component to component of that poster but I guess it's quite important that if you're wanting someone to to follow a certain information flow you really signpost that for them
SPEAKER_01:yes that's right and sometimes this means abandoning habits that you've learned elsewhere when you're writing essays or a thesis or whatever And in particular, with a lot of educational and academic forms, the sort of big bang revelation comes very near the end when you've plowed through 200 pages of a PhD thesis. And then there's a big reveal. And so you get into this habit of kind of postponing the moment of enlightenment. Whereas what you want to do with a poster is actually be decisive about that. Like, come on, what's the big find? What's the big reveal? Tell us what you think. So you could stick that in the middle of a poster I quite like posters that are actually designed around central images, visual images and the image. That's the thing you want people to understand and remember.
SPEAKER_00:Listening to you say that, what it reminds me of is something I actually loathe, which is sort of the algorithmic nature in way videos on the internet are ranked and promoted. And if you haven't grabbed someone's attention within four seconds, then you've kind of lost the battle. But that concept is really at the heart of this, isn't it? Make your post grab somebody's attention.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's right.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so we've talked around having information accessible and in ensuring that that is okay being a working phrase what's your advice here on improving inclusion i mean are there other things we can think about in terms of how we convey that information or how we might even design that information
SPEAKER_01:yes so i think this is something that people tend to learn with experience, but think about different types of users and what their particular needs might be. So I'll give a couple of examples. Wheelchair users. So it's difficult to think of one solution for this. I think it's quite a complex one, but we quite naturally use phrases like eye height. You think that doesn't work. That doesn't work. So then you have to think your job is to make sure that one way or another, you make this accessible for someone who's in a wheelchair. And that might be, you know, we talked about handouts earlier. That might be where having a handout with the actual poster that you can give to them and talk it through with them whilst they're in their chair. Another kind of disability you could think of is visual impairment. So I'll give you an example, which I find comes up a lot when I'm working with students. is the example of colorblindness if you're not colorblind yourself it's very easy to forget there is such a thing the main form of colorblindness is problems distinguishing between red and red and green and unfortunately people use these a lot symbolically so they tend to use red to mean you know disadvantages and warning signs and green to mean benefits and advantages i remember one student she organized a poster around this and she had you know green and the top and red at the bottom. But if you've got that form of colour blindness, it all just looks the same. I think the second most common form of colour blindness, which I gather is rather more rare, is problems distinguishing blue and yellow. And unfortunately, people use those a lot because they actually tend to look nice together. So there are various apps available on the internet to help you monitor this. I've used one with students called VizCheck. So there are apps where you can take your image, you can feed it into the app, and it will tell you, you know, there's this kind of problem, there's this kind of problem. And that's very helpful. It will alert you to things. And then after a while, once you've used it a bit, you kind of get to know where the problems are anyway.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, no, that's absolutely fascinating. And it's fantastic that there are those apps available. I mean, I was completely unaware of that. So thank you for that nugget. Brilliant. Anthony, really very interesting. Thank you very much for sharing your wisdom with us today. I believe the next episode we're going to be talking around the design features of posters. So I'm very much looking forward to that. So until then, thank you very much for this episode.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Bart.
SPEAKER_00:And thank you for listening.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
