After a recent seminar, Despina, stayed afterward to share some exciting news. I remembered Despina, she had attended a Poster Presentation Workshop the year before.

She told me, “After our workshop I submitted a poster in a contest and I won an award for my poster!” She then shared with me that her results at the time were very preliminary and that she attributed her success to the skills she had learned in the workshop. I think she was being kind and humble, but I was very glad she shared her success with me. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to know that I helped someone with their scientific career. It’s why I do this job. It’s why I am so passionate about communication because I know it has a direct impact on personal and professional success.
I asked her if she was willing to share her award winning poster on this blog and she graciously agreed.

Here is her Poster Presentation. Of course, I can’t resist giving a brief review.

Three things I like about the poster:

* I liked that she used a mix of fonts. She used a sans-serif font for “far-away viewing” text like the titles and then used a serif font for close-up text. This use of fonts makes it the most efficient for reading.

* The purpose is crisp, clear, and concise. Most importantly it is the first item a viewer reads in the purpose section. Perfect!

* The poster is not overloaded with results. In posters particularly, less is more. She very clearly demonstrated that.

Three things I might have done differently had it been my poster:

* I would not have used red as the highlight color. Red is extremely difficult to read. I would have picked dark blue as the highlight color. Especially because she uses dark blue in other parts of the poster. (I would have also removed that orange background on the DBT image.)

* I would have bulleted text for faster reading. At a minimum removed the sentence punctuation and removed “extra” words and used only key words and phrases.

* For the graphs, direct label data lines (when possible eliminate graph legends) because it speeds up the reading and understanding of the graph.

Despina, thanks for sharing your poster and congratulatons on your success.

Your Challenge:
Critical review the last poster you completed and see if you can’t make some improvements now that you’ve seen an award winner!

Want to learn more about effective poster presentations? Consider attending a poster presenation seminar or workshop.