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Chapter 30
How to Prepare a Poster

It takes intelligence, even brilliance, to condense and focus information into a clear, simple presentation that will be read and remembered.
Ignorance and arrogance are shown in a crowded, complicated, hard-to-read poster.
—Mary Helen Briscoe

Sizes and Shapes

In recent years, poster displays have become ever more common at both national and international meetings. (Posters
are display boards on which scientists show their data and describe their experiments.) As attendance at meetings
increased, and as pressure mounted on program committees to schedule more and more papers for oral presentation,
something had to change. The large annual meetings, such as those of the Federation of American Societies of
Experimental Biology, got to the point where available meeting rooms were simply exhausted. And, even when
sufficient numbers of rooms were available, the resulting large numbers of concurrent sessions made it difficult or
impossible for attending scientists to keep up with the work being presented by colleagues.

At first, program committees simply rejected whatever number of abstracts was deemed to be beyond the capabilities
of meeting room space. Then, as poster sessions were developed, program committees were able to take the sting out
of rejection by advising the ''rejectees" that

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they could consider presenting their work as posters. In the early days, the posters were actually relegated to the
hallways of the meeting hotels or conference centers; still, many authors, especially graduate students attempting to
present their first paper, were happy to have their work accepted for a poster session rather than being knocked off the
program entirely. Also, the younger generation of scientists had come of age during the era of science fairs, and they
liked posters.

Nowadays, of course, poster sessions have become an accepted and meaningful part of many meetings. Large
societies set aside substantial space for the poster presentations. At a recent Annual Meeting of the American Society
for Microbiology, about 2,500 posters were presented. Even small societies often encourage poster presentations,
because many people have now come to believe that some types of material can be presented more effectively in
poster graphics than in the confines of the traditional 10-minute oral presentation.

As poster sessions became normal parts of many society meetings, the rules governing the preparation of posters have
become much more strict. When a large number of posters have to be fitted into a given space, obviously the
requirements have to be carefully stated. Also, as posters have become common, convention bureaus have made it
their business to supply stands and other materials; scientists could thus avoid shipping or carrying bulky materials to
the convention city.

Don't ever commence the actual preparation of a poster until you know the requirements specified by the meeting
organizers. You of course must know the height and width of the stand. You also must know the approved methods of
fixing exhibit materials to the stand. The minimum sizes of type may be specified, and the sequence of presentation
may be specified (usually from left to right). This information is usually provided in the program for the meeting.

Organization

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