I recently attended a webinar on "Better Posters" by Mike Morrison. My key learnings from the webinar:
1. With posters, you need to communicate fast. You have a few seconds to catch someone's attention as they walk past your poster in an exhibition or corridor. The information you are putting out may be important. It's necessary to try and aim at reaching your message to ALL of those who pass by, rather than just a few.
2. Get in touch with your feelings. Mike repeated this often. And I wondered why. It then struck me that perhaps when you are creating a science poster, you reduce the communication to the mere facts and drain out all human elements from it. This can happen when empathy is missing from the communication.
If the poster is about a drug claiming to cure cancer, it is important information for someone who is suffering from cancer and for someone who is treating cancer patients. How can we get the top-level information of a poster to these people in a few seconds? For the communicator, it may merely be information. For the cancer patient, it may make a difference to their life.
Only when we are in touch with our own feelings can we even fathom how the intended audience might receive the message.
3. Another thing that he repeated often was to communicate the same message across visual, verbal, and emotional channels. Sometimes, in presentations the on-screen text is about one thing while the speaker is saying something that is not exactly the same -- the speaker may be introducing some additional information. This can be jarring and delay comprehension.
4. Templates can bring in boredom or synaptic fatigue, as Mike put it. Slide after slide, if information is presented in the same way, you might just zoom out. Bring in variety. Even talk differently during a presentation, Mike advised. I wonder how this piece of advice would sit with marketing folks. The same message is bombarded on to our senses again and again in the name of branding. Perhaps this is one reason why people tune out of advertisements.
5. Avoid chunky text or too much text in posters. It's easy to be over-enthusiastic in pouring out every bit of information into the poster. However, we need to deliver the top-level information in just a few seconds. That's the hook to convert the passer-by into an interested reader. Once this happens, you can go incrementally into more details.
