How to Make an Academic Poster

What is an academic poster?

An academic poster is one of many ways to communicate your research or scholarship. Researchers use books, talks, teaching, journal articles, press releases, and popular media to communicate their findings.  An academic poster, when done effectively, is a way to showcase your work at conferences and meetings in a concise and aesthetically pleasing format. 

Your ultimate goal is to share the story of your work with as many people as possible. This will give you the opportunity to network with people that may be future advisers, employers, or collaborators, and you can receive important feedback on your work. 

To bring people in, your poster should communicate the topic quickly and include visual elements such as pictures, graphs, maps and diagrams, as well as text. 

At its core, an effective poster is centered on a concise and powerful story. With the help of visuals, the presenter can share the story of the work in a matter of minutes.

Getting started

Start with your story and plan to have a beginning, middle, and end. 

• Organize your ideas and create an outline or sketch of where you plan to place the various details of your poster, which should include the title, body of text, pictures, key points, etc. 

• Decide where each section will go. 

Focus on visuals and what you need to show the viewer your story. 

• The pictures, facts, graphs, and diagrams are the most important part of the poster. 

• Choose images and diagrams wisely, and make sure they clearly support your point. 

• Always include a large picture to grab passersby’s attention. 

• High quality photos will translate better in large print. 

Write a short title that is a positive statement describing the main result/takeaway. 

• Use sentence case for the title. 

• Make it as large as possible, creating space by eliminating logos and reducing the font size of authors and affiliations. 

Do not include an abstract on the poster. 

• It is redundant since it is a short summary of your work and so is the rest of the poster. 

Poster dimensions vary, but 48” x 36” (landscape or portrait) is a common poster size. 

• Setting dimensions before editing or adding components to the poster will reduce the amount of time needed to readjust the poster later. 

Fonts & formatting 

There are many acceptable fonts and font styles to choose from, but less is often best. Here are some basic font guidelines to consider:  

• Consider using short passages or “bullet” format.  

• Use sans serif fonts, which typically read better and are viewable from a distance.  

• Keep heading sizes consistent. Text having the same level of importance should be the same font size.  

• Avoid excessive text. (Poster should have roughly 20% text, 40% figures, 40% space)  

• Text and figures should be legible from around 5-7 feet away (or roughly 1.5m to 2m)—see recommendations below.

• Leave breathing space around your text and sections.  

• Do not use a different font type to highlight important points—otherwise the fluency and flow of your sentence can appear disrupted.  

• Do not use all UPPERCASE type in your posters. It can make the material difficult to read.  

• Use the bold face or italics or combinations to emphasize words and phrases.  

• Left-align text. Using fully justified text will create large gaps between some words and make it difficult to read.

Font combinations 

Keep it simple:

• Too many fonts distract the viewer and make it undesirable to look at, let alone read. 

• Keep the fonts simple and limit them to no more than two font types. Arial and Verdana are pleasing to the reader’s eye. 

• Drop shadow font is not recommended. 

• What you see isn’t always what you get.

• When choosing colors for your poster, using 2-3 colors will give the best look. Too many colors make it look chaotic and unprofessional, but having no color makes it dull and plain. 

• If you are creating images on the computer, note that colors may appear differently on your screen. 

• A light color for the background with a dark colored text or a darker background with light text is often a good choice. 

• The greater the contrast between the font color and the background color, the easier it will be to see and read. 

• Always try to avoid bright color combinations that make you squint. 

Preview your poster at full size 

Once your poster is complete, view it at full size and examine all graphics before submitting it for printing. 

• Many graphic files do not scale up well (when stretched to a larger size they appear blurry), especially if you copy or paste a graphic or chart from a website or another document. 

• If your graphic appears blurry at full size, you need to use a different graphic that has a higher resolution.