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241 pages

English

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Description

Better posters mean better research.

Distilling over a decade of experience from the popular Better Posters blog, Zen Faulkes will help you create a clear and informative conference poster that delivers maximum impact.

Academics have used posters to share research for more than five decades, and tens of thousands of posters are presented at conferences every year. Despite the popularity of the format, no in-depth guide has been available on how to create and deliver compelling conference posters. From over-long titles, tiny text and swarms of logos, to bad font choices, chaotic colour schemes and blurry images – it’s easy to leave viewers confused about your poster’s message.

The solution is Better Posters: a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know – from writing a title and submitting an abstract, to designing the poster and finally presenting it in the poster session. Your conference poster will be one of your first research outputs, and the poster session is your first introduction to a professional community. Making a great poster develops the skills to create publications, reports, outreach and teaching materials throughout your career.

This book also has material for conference organizers on how to make a better poster session for their attendees.

Foreword by Echo Rivera

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Poster design: the short form

Part I - For viewers

2 Attending a poster session

Part II - For presenters

3 Why posters?

4 Design thinking

5 Early preparation

6 Narrative thinking

7 Visual thinking and graphic design

8 Figures

9 Presenting data

10 Colors

11 Beyond paper

12 Text and type

13 Layout

14 Grids

15 Background

16 Title bars

17 Blocks of text

18 Sections

19 Images and graphics, revisited

20 Fine-tuning

21 Before you print

22 Printing

23 Travel

24 Networking and presentation

25 After the conference

Part III - For organizers

26 Poster session planning

27 Conference website resources

28 During the conference

Part IV - What next?

29 Constant improvement

Afterword

References

Index

Sujets

EDUCATION

Sciences de l'éducation

Higher

Methodology

Level

Textbook

General officer

School

Scientific method

Higher education

Graphic design

General

Research

Science

Informations

Publié par	Pelagic Publishing
Date de parution	24 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781784272364
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	7 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Better Posters
The author in his natural habitat: presenting a poster at a conference.
Better Posters
Plan, Design, and Present a Better Academic Poster
ZEN FAULKES
PELAGIC PUBLISHING
Published by Pelagic Publishing PO Box 874 Exeter EX3 9BR UK
www.pelagicpublishing.com
Better Posters: Plan, design, and present a better academic poster
ISBN 978-1-78427-235-7 Paperback ISBN 978-1-78427-236-4 ePub ISBN 978-1-78427-237-1 PDF
© Zen Faulkes 2021 Foreword © Echo Rivera 2021
All images and figures are © the author unless otherwise indicated
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Apart from short excerpts for use in research or for reviews, no part of this document may be printed or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, now known or hereafter invented or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
This manuscript was written in Microsoft Word ( www.office.com ). Figures were made using Origin ( www.originlab.com ), CorelDRAW, and Corel Photo-Paint ( corel.com ). The “hand-lettered” typeface used in many figures is Unmasked from Blambot Studios ( blambot.com ).
For my family: my wife Sakshi, my pack Max, my father Kevin and my mother Karren
Contents
Foreword by Echo Rivera
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Poster design: the short form
Part I For viewers
2. Attending a poster session
Part II For presenters
3. Why posters?
4. Design thinking
5. Early preparation
6. Narrative thinking
7. Visual thinking and graphic design
8. Figures
9. Presenting data
10. Colors
11. Beyond paper
12. Text and type
13. Layout
14. Grids
15. Background
16. Title bars
17. Blocks of text
18. Sections
19. Images and graphics, revisited
20. Fine-tuning
21. Before you print
22. Printing
23. Travel
24. Networking and presentation
25. After the conference
Part III For organizers
26. Poster session planning
27. Conference website resources
28. During the conference
Part IV What next?
29. Constant improvement
Afterword
References
Index
Foreword
If you’re like most academics, you have not received formal training in verbal or visual communication skills. So, it’s not all that surprising we frequently commiserate about jargon-filled wall-of-text conference posters and #DeathByPowerPoint presentations.
It seems that most (if not all) of us know there is a problem with how academia communicates their research and educational material. Luckily, there is a group of folks dedicated to fixing this problem and helping academics more effectively communicate their work. Zen Faulkes (or, as he is also known on Twitter, Doctor Zen) is one such person that has been helping academics create more engaging and effective conference posters for years. It’s why I am so excited for Doctor Zen’s book on poster design and was happy to write this foreword for this book.
I train educators (e.g., academics, scientists, researchers, evaluators) to create visually engaging and effective slide presentations. In other words, my focus area is on ending #DeathByPowerPoint. There is, however, a lot of overlap between visual presentations and conference posters, and almost all the people I work with create both posters and presentations. So, I keep an eye out for poster design resources that I can share. Doctor Zen’s poster design website was one that I often shared with others.
I published my first blog post about posters because I kept getting requests for templates, and even saw conferences starting to recommend or require templates. As a presentation designer and trainer, the number one biggest struggle for me is convincing people that a slide template will not solve their problems. I’ve lost count of the number of times folks have asked me to design a template for them, in hopes that this template will make their presentations visually engaging from that point on. It’s taken years of educational work to explain to folks that #DeathByPowerPoint is caused by something much deeper than the wrong template. The last thing I wanted was for the idea of a template to become expected (or even more expected) in the poster design field, too.
The blog post I wrote about why templates aren’t the solution for posters (or presentations) caught Doctor Zen’s attention – that’s how we connected, and ultimately why I’m writing this foreword. In my opinion, this book fills a huge gap in the training literature on how to create an effective conference poster. Many of the folks I work with have asked for help with applying the presentation design strategies I teach to their conference posters. I have a long to-do list, and one of the items (at the bottom) was to create lessons about poster design for people. Now that this book is available, I can cross that item off my list and recommend this book instead. It’s that comprehensive, and it aligns with the design principles and critical thinking skills I teach in my presentation design training.
What I appreciate most about Doctor Zen’s poster design book is that he effectively explains why templates are not the solution for poster design (which can be directly applied to presentation design!). He argues that academics and scientists should learn design thinking and graphic design skills as a foundation for knowing how to design a poster. To my delight, he goes beyond that and also talks about ways to emotionally resonate with people instead of just throwing a giant wall of facts and data at them. These are the principles that will help you design conference posters that make an impact and will be more likely to catch people’s attention, help them understand your content, remember your content, and (ideally) use it later on. That’s the power of effective communication, and as you will soon see, why we need to go beyond superficial template designs. You will find an excellent book to help you learn practical design thinking and graphic design skills. The examples and visuals provided throughout are helpful, with just enough humor to make this a fun read as well.
A pleasant surprise was finding out that this book goes beyond poster design tips. Doctor Zen also explains the context of a poster session and conference more broadly. If you are a first-generation college student like I am (or if you’ve never attended a poster session) then you will find this additional information to be a valuable resource. This is the book I wish I had had before going to my first poster session or creating my first poster as an undergrad student. Back then I had no idea what to do, what the audience was expecting, or what poster presenters were expecting of me. I was overwhelmed, confused, intimidated, and ended up glancing at a few things and leaving because I didn’t know the social code of conduct for poster sessions. Doctor Zen shares information about that, as well as important conference basics such as the difference between posters and other common conference formats. Again, as a first-generation student, I didn’t understand what most of these terms meant when I applied to my first few conferences.
Overall, Doctor Zen has provided a valuable contribution to the academic field with this book. Thank you for picking up this book, and thank you for working to make your poster more effective. If we see more people following the advice in this book, and fewer people searching for a template to solve their problems, then I see an end to jargon-filled, visually starved, wall-of-text conference posters. Instead, I see a future of poster sessions filled with excellent design, creativity and – most importantly – with folks who are able to communicate their work effectively in ways that make a lasting impact.
Echo Rivera
Dr. Echo Rivera is the owner and founder of Creative Research Communications, LLC, a Denver-based company that specializes in graphic design consultancy for academics. Her website is www.echorivera.com and she is @echoechoR on Twitter and Instagram.
Preface
I created the Better Posters blog ( betterposters.blogspot.com ) in March 2009 out of self-preservation. I’d seen so many bad conference posters, and made more than a few myself, that I hoped that if I blogged about them there might be a little less ugliness in the world. Plus, I had noticed that there was an unfilled niche for discussion about poster design for academics. There were static websites with good advice, but nothing that was continuously updated. It felt like people thought conference posters were a solved problem with nothing left to say about it, but I thought there was so much more to discuss. I wrote the blog for fun and for free because I’ve always believed academics were public figures who should try to make their ideas free.
But something surprising happened: people started reading the blog. (This is never a given for anything online.) Even more surprising was that people started sending me their posters, let me show them on the blog and criticize them. And as the blog grew in popularity, people started to tell me that they were recommending the blog to people, particularly to students who were about to make their first poster. I appreciated the recommendations, but increasingly I realized it was unfair to expect anyone making a poster for the first time to trawl through years of weekly blog posts that were posted with no plan beyond “I think I’ll write about this today.” (This is the downside to having a long-running and ongoing project.)
So I wrote this book because there was a need for something different than the blog. People needed a something that was more like a start-to-finish poster-making manual that was coherently organized. The ideas are still free and will continue to be explored on the blog, but this book can provide a key, a guided entry ramp, into the process