Skip to main content

Handouts and other papers

The ESA Student Section tweeted:

Conference tip: Presenting a poster? Consider giving some sort of handout: a print out of the poster, or additional info. #ESA2017

It’s a common tip, but I got thinking about it. What’s the purpose of duplicating your poster in miniature?

I’ve always thought the point of having a poster handout was to remind people about your academic work. But I was cleaning off my desk recently, and found quite a few handouts of posters I’d collected from conferences. I’d hauled them back from the meeting, but I hadn’t looked at them for their scientific content or contact information since. The handout had failed in their purpose.

I’m particularly wondering about the trouble of making, carrying, and tacking up poster handouts in the days where these are ubiquitous:


If anyone wants to look at a poster later, why not just take a picture of it? If someone wants my email, why not take a picture of my contact info on my poster?

Granted, there are a few meetings where the conference organizers try to prohibit photographs of posters. It’s dumb and ineffectual, in my estimation, but a handout makes sense at such meetings.

There is value of creating handouts, but not to give them out when people are standing in front of your poster.

First, by making handouts, you force yourself to do the “arm’s length” test. If you can’t read the poster when it’s shrunk down to letter sized paper, your audience will struggle to read the full sized version on the poster board.

Second, you should have handouts so that you can give them to people who are not at your poster session. Most poster sessions are shorter than meetings, but you will be meeting people all through the conference. If you have small handouts of your poster, you can show someone your work at a coffee break, even if your poster session is already over and done with.

Making a poster handout is usually simple. I export my poster as a PDF, and PDFs can be readily printed to fit the size of your printer paper. As I noted above, if you have a good poster that passes the “arm’s length” test, you won’t have to redo or adjust anything.

There are maybe two other kinds of paper that are worth having ready to give.

  • Business cards are compact, socially expected, and can be very beautiful. Even better if they act as invitations.
  • Reprints can be useful if you have already published material that your poster builds upon. People might read those on the plane home.

Related posts

Don’t get mad, get playful
Invitation cards
Link roundup for December 2012

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Better Posters Twitter account temporarily down

The automated Twitter feed for this blog (@Better_Posters) is currently down. I had logged in to make a few cosmetic changes to the feed. When I did, I was prompted to add a birthday, so I picked the day the blog went live. Little did I know that since this was ten years ago, it didn’t meet Twitter’s minimum age requirement of 13. This instantly got the account locked. I have put in a service ticket, and will post here when the feed is back.
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading gravity

Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ. I recently learned that something I’ve called “ the Cosmo principle ” on this blog is an actual thing that proper designers talk about, except they have a different name for it. They call it “reading gravity.” The picture above is sometimes called a “Gutenberg diagram.” Apparently it was given that name by newspaper designer Edmond Arnold (interviewed here , where he refers to the “Gutenberg principle”). I’m not completely sure about this; need to do some more reading. What this image calls the “primary optical area,” I’ve usually called the “sex story,” because that’s invariably what occupies that position on every cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. The “terminal area” is usually what I’ve called the “take home message.” What I find usually ends up in the lower left corner, or “weak fallow area” as its called here, are my methods section. And that’s fine, because those are usually only of interest to the afficiandos. This diagram is wort...
Post a Comment
Read more

Link roundup for October 2016

Contrast matters, and web page designers are starting to forget that . Kevin Marks delves into how grey text is becoming so prominent on the web. Marks notes something I’ve talked about before: the difference between the screen and a poster handing on a wall. (W)hen you design in perfect settings, with big, contrast-rich monitors, you blind yourself to users. To arbitrarily throw away contrast based on a fashion that “looks good on my perfect screen in my perfectly lit office” is abdicating designers’ responsibilities to the very people for whom they are designing. Hat tip to Robert J. Sawyer. It’s great when you have a lab to go to a conference with. But not everyone has a lab. Here are tips for how to rock a conference solo . An occasional reminder that if your poster hangs for several days, create opportunities for people to give feedback when you are not there: Hat tip to Ciera Martinez . Stephen Heard is unimpressed with most conference badges . This led me to another discussion o...
Post a Comment
Read more