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Poster Presentation Guidelines

Poster sessions are on Wednesday and Thursday, October 30 – 31 from 3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. You should be at your poster to present your work during the poster session on your assigned day. Poster set-up begins at 10:00 a.m. on your assigned day, and all posters need to be removed at the end of your assigned session. Your poster should be 36 inches x 48 inches in either direction (portrait or landscape). Do not send your poster ahead-of-time.; simply bring it with you to the conference. Abstract numbers will help you to determine where you should place your poster on your assigned day.

Helpful Guidelines when Preparing your Poster

Make your title so that it quickly attracts your audience. Crafting a title that has a message is one way to do this. Make the title the most prominent block of text on the poster.

The poster should quickly have your audience understanding the subject and purpose. This is often accomplished with a meaningful title, a clearly-stated objective, and supporting images. The font size should be large enough to read from a distance of 6 feet, and the color of the text should contrast with the color of the background. Important information should be readable from about 10 feet away.

Your findings should be obvious and easy for the reader to locate. Highlight important data in your graph or table. Individual sections should be designed so that the reader can quickly read them – large blocks of texts don’t lend themselves to easy comprehension in the busy poster presentation environment. The use of bullets, numbering, and headlines make posters easier to read. If possible, you should rely on mostly images to tell the story of your research.

Finally, please prepare and practice the delivery of your presentation. The poster is not meant to stand alone but should serve as the support for a spoken presentation. It helps to prepare a short “elevator pitch” style presentation that highlights your findings in just a few minutes, and then have more details for an engaged audience. The most in-depth conversations, idea transfer and generation, and networking often occur during the face-to-face poster presentations.