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Label everything, or at least every kind of thing. The labels should be meaningful
to the audience—if you have omitted material from the talk, omit corresponding
material from the figure.
Posters
A poster session can be one of the most vibrant parts of a conference. Whole halls can
be filled with lines of posters, with a presenter in front of each one ready to explain
it to interested listeners. Conference attendees, often in a dense crowd, walk through
the posters. They glance at some, read others, or stop to talk to a presenter—for a
moment, a minute, or, sometimes, for hours. Poster sessions are perhaps the single
best opportunity for a researcher to meet new colleagues.
A well-designed poster will meet the needs of all of the people who pass by. As is
true for a research paper, readers should be able to quickly tell if it is not of interest
to them; no-one wants to spend their time reading something that turns out to be
irrelevant. For those who are mildly interested, the main points should be presented
so that they can be digested in a few moments. For attendees who are genuinely
interested in the work, a strong poster has content that supports the presenter, who
should have prepared a detailed story about the research that the poster represents.
A good poster, then, is a balance of several separate aims. It serves as a way of
attracting the interest of people passing by, a summary of the work, a support for
both brief and detailed conversations about the research, and a demonstration that
the work has been undertaken in a robust way.
Content
The first steps in design of a poster are much the same as for design of a talk: assembly
of the content. My advice on getting started is as for talks, given earlier in this chapter.
Before the poster can be assembled, you first need to know what story you want to
tell; this will be an overview of the research, motivation, and outcomes and not, in
most cases, the detail of the work itself.
The narrative that accompanies a poster should derive from what you plan to say.
Don't set out by asking how your work can be crammed onto a single A0 or A1 sheet
of paper. Instead, ask yourself how the work can be explained in a minute or two,
and what illustrations and text will help the explanation to proceed smoothly.
For a talk, there is just one version of the narrative. For a poster, the narrative can
be different for everyone you speak to, depending on their background and level of
interest. You should consider what the 1-min explanation of your work will be; and
what might be needed in the 10-min version.
 
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