The shut out: when nobody visits your posters

A couple of weeks ago, I featured a poster that had no visitors. This, followed by having to defend poster sessions the next week got me wondering.

Just how many people put in the time and effort to give a poster and talk to nobody?

I ran a Twitter poll. I even ran it during the Neuroscience meeting, one of the biggest venues for poster presentations in the world. I was surprised.

Almost half of respondents have put in a good faith effort and got shut out, with no one talking to them.

This might explain why people have such differing reactions to poster sessions. I have given 38 posters at conferences. I have never lacked an audience. And I don’t think that’s because I’m particularly charming or do the hottest science or make the most visually interesting posters. (Of those 38, I’ve made maybe two or three posters I’ve been very happy with). I think I’m just another presenter in the session.

My experience has been consistently positive, but now I know I’m in the lucky half. I can see how the experience of having nobody talk to you could turn someone off poster sessions right quick. Many would probably never want to do a poster after even a single experience like that.

This points out how important it is for those who are not presenting posters – often the senior academics – to get out into the poster sessions and be the most active audience members, not hanging around in the “zone of intimidation” (which I dubbed the PIZI).

Madison Fletcher wrote:

During undergrad poster sessions especially, I actively seek out students who have people walk right by even if I don’t know anything about their topic. Invariably, I learn something!

Be like Madison!

Comments

You have options for numbers (PowerPoint users need not apply)

If you must have a table on your poster, look into what options you have for your numbers. Many fonts have number variants. Proportional numbers have skinny numbers (e.g., 1) and wide numbers (e.g., 0). Two numbers differ in width depending on what numbers they have. But tabular numbers are all the same width. So decimal places and dividers will line up if the numbers are lined up, as they are in a table. If you have a table, it only makes sense to use tabular numbers if you can. They are explicitly designed to make your tables more readable! But tabular numbers will only do so if you follow a couple of other good practices: Make your numbers right aligned. Use the same number of decimal places in each column. You may also find a couple of other options. numbers can be either lining numbers (all the same height) or oldstyle (with ascenders and descenders, like upper and lower-case letters). That means you have four options for many fonts. In Microsoft Office, these options are...

Scott McCloud’s “Big triangle” and poster design

Posters are a visual medium. But not everything is equally visual. A picture of a real object is very visual, and the best thing to have on a poster. A scatter plot is less visual. And text is the least of all. I was thinking about how I might make that point, um, visually, and I suddenly realized that I was just recreating one side of Scott McCloud ’s triangle from Understanding Comics . If you have not read Understanding Comics ... oh, how I envy you. You have that to look forward to. It is a wonderful book. Even if you are the sort who thinks, “Ugh, superheroes,” get over it, read this damn book, and have your consciousness expanded. It is an undisputed classic book. Here’s a except relevant to the matter at hand: And that’s the point I was trying to make, except McCloud did it better over twenty years ago. Received information is immediate; perceived information takes effort. This is why nobody likes posters with too much writing. It takes effort that, in a busy conference settin...

Critique: Lending low tech tools

Today’s poster contributor is Scott Johnson. Click to enlarge! This is a great marriage of content and form. The content is about something that is unabashedly “low tech,” so the hand-written, slightly lo-fi (okay, low tech) look is completely right here. It adds character and interest. Regular readers know that I personally am anti-underlining, and try to remove it in almost every instance I see it. But here, because it’s hand written, I can see the case for it. When people write by hand, they do underline for emphasis. I would experiment a bit with removing the underline, but I don’t know if removing the the underlines for headings and making the headinga a bit bolder would lose the look. I appreciate the purity of the monochrome greyscale, but it does wash out from a distance. I would like to see a little colour – even if subdued, and not everywhere. To keep the “low tech” look, I would suggest referencing some old photos, like daguerreotypes. They often weren’t pure shades of gr...

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