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How to do a Digital Scientific Poster
How to do a Digital Scientific Poster
By John Hickey (2026-06-05)
I recently went to a scientific conference and was going to have to travel internationally with a poster. I don’t like traveling with bulky items and the time and cost for the fabric posters that end up wrinkled left me feeling unsatisfied. Moreover a trainee in my lab had just made a fantastic video for our project that I was presenting on. Looking at my iPad I had just purchased for teaching, I thought why not use an iPad? So began my journey towards a digital poster.
What is a digital poster?
I did not simply shrink a normal poster onto a tablet. Instead it is an interactive portal to a scientific conversation. I wanted this because at a poster session, people are moving around, stopping briefly, asking questions, and deciding quickly whether they want to engage. It should give people a clear starting point but then be flexible to let the conversation branch from there.
The amazing thing about PowerPoint is that it allows you a really easy way to create buttons to specific slides. So you can create a number of slides and have a home screen to always return to. If someone wants the short version, I can stay at the overview. If they want to see the dynamic data, I can jump to the movie. If they want to evaluate rigor, I can go straight to controls, methods, or backup analyses. I can have as much content as I want without the presenter knowing—they get just what they came for.
The poster becomes less like a fixed page and more like a guided scientific conversation.
Why use a digital poster?
Already, you can see that after developing my first digital poster I realized that there are more reasons that the convenience and ability to play movies. Here are some benefits that I have seen:
· In biology and bioengineering, many results are dynamic. Cells move, change shape, interact, respond to perturbations, and behave differently over time. A single static image can be useful, but it often leaves out the most important part: the behavior.
· A digital poster lets me show movies, replay events, slow things down, and compare before-and-after examples. It also lets me zoom into high-resolution images, fields of view, annotations, or subtle morphology that might be lost when compressed into a printed figure.
· And scientific conversations are rarely linear. One person may want to start with the biological question. Another may care most about the method. Someone else may immediately ask about controls or want to see the raw images. With a digital poster, I can jump directly to the part of the work that is most relevant to the person standing in front of me.
· There are practical advantages too. Digital posters can be updated, reused, and adapted without reprinting. They are especially convenient for travel because there is no poster tube, no printing deadline, and no risk of the poster getting damaged in transit. They also make it easy to share links to a poster PDF, lab website, paper, abstract, or contact information.
· One thing I really like about the digital format is that the poster session does not have to be the end of the interaction. A QR code can link to the poster, a lab website, a paper or preprint, contact information, or other resources. For a reusable setup, I like the idea of keeping the orientation poster general and then using separate QR codes for the specific conference presentation. That way, the explanatory poster does not need to be reprinted each time.
How to help people interact with it
The first time I did this, everyone around me had printed posters. I only had my iPad and a few large pieces of paper that I had printed out for my lab website, the dynamic PowerPoint presentation, and a link to the preprint. People were apprehensive to approach me, partially because I think that they thought I had forgot my poster, so I had to be direct about approaching people about what I was doing. As I engaged people they were curious to see it and after the initial person stopped a curious crowd stayed for the rest of the time.
However, because of this experience I made a “poster about a digital poster” (meta). This helps people realize this is intentional and also another way to incorporate some permanent information like lab website and acknowledgements and guide people who are not engaged at the moment.
I always needed to first give a 20 second spiel on what is a digital poster and how to use it by showing them buttons, etc. Then I would go back to the overview slide and give a 45 second spiel on the science and ask them what they were more interested in learning about. Then the conversation was off. For me I put a movie on the main screen that kept me strictly to 45 seconds of explanation of the overview.
My main takeaway
I really enjoyed this new set up and even the first time I did this without the explanatory poster and tripod and first presentation, I was awarded the “Best Poster Award” at the Single-cell Gordon Research Conference, so it was not only me who enjoyed this format.
Here are some more resources that could be helpful for you to create your own digital posters. You can download our:
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