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.Not only must it meet these objectives but, for at least the first three of them, it must do sowithin a very short time.Complying with this rigid time constraint is the key to designingsuccessful posters.Imagine delegates to a typical conference entering the poster hall to view and becomeinformed by as many as 200 posters in no more than, say, two hours.If they perused allof the material in front of them they would have an average of just 36 seconds to devoteto each poster.To do so would clearly be impossible so they have to choose which ones toignore and which to explore thoroughly.They start to stroll down the rows, glancing at eachposter to determine whether it will be worth a second (or possibly a third) glance.In well-organised conferences, delegates may be supplied with sufficient preliminary material forthem to do their poster shopping before the session, or even before the conference begins.Even so, the delegate may still plan to see a long list of posters and will always be prone tobeing distracted by an appealing interloper, so catching the eye is always important.Eachposter has about 2 seconds to catch the eye of each delegate.If it is successful at catching the eye, the delegate will begin to search for something ofinterest.There are three possibilities here." The poster is not in the field of interest of the delegate who determines this rapidlyand moves on." The delegate cannot decipher a message from the poster rapidly and makes a decision notto waste more time seeking further and moves on." The delegate finds a key message that the poster is about something that is interestingand stays to read the rest of the poster in detail.Each poster has about 10 seconds to stimulate scientific interest.If the poster has succeeded at this hurdle, the delegate now a reader starts to seekjustification in the poster for the statements that made it originally attractive.This justificationand elaboration will come in the form of data or statements of detail that expand on theprimary information.Each poster will be read for 30 to 60 seconds.THI NKI NG AND WRI TI NG BEYOND THE SCI ENTI FI C ARTI CLE89 Now, the reader will be sufficiently informed about the work on show to be able to askthe author questions about methodology, details of other work, planned or already done,prospects for employment or anything else imaginable.At this point the poster will have successfully accomplished its mission.There is virtuallyno time limit on discussions between interested readers and authors of posters.The structure of a successful posterOne of the saddest sights at conferences is authors of posters standing forlornly and alone besidetheir work, because they have failed to take heed of the four objectives outlined above.In view ofthe incredibly short constraints on time for a poster to achieve its objectives, it is clear that goodposters must follow a format that is radically different from that of ascientific article for publication or a paper for oral presentation.Thetime-honoured sequence of Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results,Discussion and Conclusion simply fails to work at the level of the poster.& good postersThe objectives are different so the format must also be different.must follow aCatching the eyeformat that isWe sometimes see posters that show the hand of professionalradically differentgraphic designers and these invariably attract attention in the wayfrom that of athat well-designed advertisements do.Many authors of scientificposters do not have access to such specialist help and have toscientific articleresort to less professional and usually less expensive means to befor publication orattractive.This should not be a major setback.After all, simplycatching the eye may be important, but is not what induces othera paper for oralscientists to stop and read the work.The content and the skilfulpresentation.presentation of the content are what does that.In any case, mostscientists have sufficient flair to ensure that the layout of their workis pleasing enough to ensure a second look from most passers-by.In an earlier chapter on written papers, when we looked at waysof emphasising the important points, we found that, apart fromposition and size, there was little scope for making certain things seem more importantthan others.Posters do not have most of those constraints.The choice of colours, or even thepresence of colours to replace dull white, the distribution and content of photographs andfigures, the use of attractive fonts of a variety of sizes and the imaginative use of diagramscan all combine to lure the viewer to take a second look.But, before this, we must be aware of a number of things that definitely make postersunattractive and get rid of them.The single most common fault of posters is an oversupply ofinformation.A presentation that looks like an oversized page from a textbook has no visualappeal and, because it is obvious that it cannot be read in 30 to 60 seconds, most people,anxious to look at all of the posters on offer, will not even attempt to do so.Another turn-off isthose unimaginative posters that consist of a number of sections, usually those that are foundin written articles like Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion, each printedSCI ENTI FI C WRI TI NG = THI NKI NG I N WORDS90 on A4 paper and pasted onto a board in the allocated space.Even worse, is text or informationthat has no direct bearing on the message that the poster is supposed to be delivering.Thesemake reading a daunting task when standing in the middle of a room among several hundredparticipants at a congress.A third widespread failing among designers of posters is to presentthem in a font that is too small to be read from further than about a metre or so.In none ofthese cases does the work have a reasonable opportunity to catch the eye of passers-by.Making a statement that arouses scientific interestThis is the part where some hard decisions have to be made.You must condense all ofthe scientifically important information in your presentation to words that can be readin no more than 10 seconds.This means, effectively, about three sentences that will beprominent enough to be taken in during the reader s first scan ofthe poster.The sentences do not have to be all together and theymay be supported by other, less prominent, material to which thereader may return later, but they must be the distilled wisdom& keep in mindof the presentation.In other words, they can be well placed andwell constructed headings or a couple of sentences that sum upthat the purposethe whole story that you are telling.With this simple criterion inof the poster ismind, it is clear that there are several components of a traditional,written paper that we must completely ignore
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