illustrated science posters

This month the ARIES Doctoral Training Winter School covered the topic of academic posters. We were each asked to bring along an a3 poster describing our research to present at an evening showcase. I love being creative, but I find academic posters difficult. I have to admit that I rarely like science posters - they are often very text heavy and not always the most visually appealing.

I decided to do some research and see if I could find ANY science posters that I liked the look of. I did! The better posters blog is a brilliant read if you want to see some more unusual approaches, and a great source of inspiration. My favourite so far is by Aleksandra Dolezal (check out her blog here). She based her design on the look of her lab bench, with botanical illustrations, handwritten fonts and hand drawn graphs on what looks like sheets of lined paper ripped from a lab/notebook. This illustration heavy/scrap-book kind of design is one I've used a lot within conservation projects but have been nervous of using within academia. There does however seem to be a shift away from the traditional academic poster design as more people are bridging the gap between art and science. I decided the ARIES training workshop was the perfect opportunity to test the waters with an illustration based approach.

Imagery

First, I wanted to highlight my methods with some imagery. I use Paint.Net to create illustrations (which is as easy to use as Paint, but combines some more useful tools). It's free to download and use. Since I created my illustrations as raster files, I knew they would pixelate if I played around with the size. You can convert your raster illustrations into vector files using this very handy online tool. Vector files are a lot more versatile - I'm planning on converting to Inkscape at some point as this is an open source vector based graphics software. Unfortunately I don't find it particularly intuitive, but it is probably worth the time investment!

Illustrations were not commonly used in posters at the ARIES training event, but were highlighted as an eye catching way of drawing people in. The use of imagery more generally was considered very important.

Text & font choice

I'm sure almost everyone would agree that text heavy posters look pretty uninviting. I think it's a hard balance between having the content you need to showcase your research effectively and making it look aesthetically pleasing. Some useful comments from the ARIES poster session highlighted that the most visually appealing posters will draw more people in, and this gives you the opportunity to expand upon the brief points orally. If people don't like the look of your poster, it'll be harder to chat about your science in more depth. So perhaps less is more. Having a clear flow (eg using boxes, headings etc) was also considered important. This can break up larger bits of text and keeps the messaging clear and logical.

I decided to have a go at making my own font which was great fun, and only took about an hour. I used the browser based font creator Calligraphr. All you need to do is hand draw your letters onto a form, scan it in, download and install into your fonts. Wait about 20 seconds and BAM you've got an easy to use font for Word or any other Microsoft programme! Hazzah! I tried using this font for all of the poster text initially, but ultimately decided to use it only for headings. I think I need to work on having neater handwriting (or at least making it line up straight) if I want to use handwritten text across the board!!

COLOUR

I love colour and I love bright and clashing colours. It can be hard to rein this in when creating an academic poster. It's also easy to get trapped into using whatever standard colours Publisher throws at you. I've started using this colour scheme generator for deciding which colours work well together. It's a quick and easy way of thinking about colour combinations you may not have considered before. It's also useful to consider how easy your poster will be to decipher for someone that is colour blind. My first draft of this poster was bright green and orange. I was pretty happy with my garish colour scheme (probably misguidedly!) until I remembered green and orange probably wouldn't be a great combination for anyone with colour blindness. I found an online tool that can simulate how a piece of work might look to someone with colour blindness, which was really useful. You may see why I decided to change my colour scheme after this exercise...

It was great seeing everyone's approach to poster making and to get feedback from lecturers at our training session. Some additional points that were useful to consider for posters at large conferences include the addition of a photo of yourself for easy identification & small print outs for attendees to take away. The text on the poster should still be legible on an a5 print out!

Below you can see my final poster. I created a very broad overview of my research but have found that my research questions/methods have already changed since I printed this! It'll be interesting to see how much this will morph over the coming years. I already have plans to update my poster to share with a wider audience - I'm sure its not uncommon for the friends and family of PhD students to not really understand what on earth you actually do. I think a poster is a great tool for addressing this!

I wasn't sure whether it would be considered unprofessional to use illustrations and hand drawn fonts, but was chuffed to win 1st prize at our ARIES showcase. I'll be incorporating some of the points discussed at the training in my work in the future and will probably continue to use illustrations in posters going forward. I know it won't be to everyones taste, but at least I'll have fun making it!