Research Posters

Steps of planning your poster

Consider your message:

• The title needs to be brief and explicit.

• The goal is to convey a clear message and support it with a compelling combination of images and short blocks of text.

Consider your audience:

• Colleagues?

• People in fields closely related to yours?

• People in unrelated fields?

*A poster needs to speak to all of them!

• Provide context.

• Use plain language.

• Avoid scientific jargon or acronyms.

• Interpret the findings so that everyone can understand them.

Keep your focus on the topic:

• Stay focused on the message.

• Keep it simple – leave out unnecessary details.

• Keep text simple and sentences short.

Other considerations:

• When do I need to have the poster finished? What is the deadline?
• How large is the poster? How much room do I have for the designs?
• Where will you print it? How much will it cost to print?

Examples of Existing Posters

Posters from UAlberta's ERA Repository:

• The U of A has a repository where students, staff, and faculty may submit their posters for long-term preservation. Click the link below to browse the list of all submitted posters.

• Modify the search to see if you can find some posters that are similar in method or topic to your own project, or that appeal to you! Browse these examples to get ideas on how to organize your own poster.

• Remember that you are looking for inspiration for the structure and design of your poster, and that you will need to transform their ideas into content that expresses your own work appropriately. If you borrow more than inspiration, you may need to cite the poster, as you would with any other referenced work.

• Click here to be brought to the search on ERA that has been filtered for posters from conferences/workshops.