Dealing with questions Oral presentations

9.3 Poster presentations 239 Figure 9.8 Example of a badly designed poster pale yellow text on a white background or white text on a pale pastel background – it will be too difficult to read. However, don’t go for white text on a dark black background either. While these colours may contrast well, the overall appearance of the poster can be daunting and difficult to read.

9.3.7 Examples

Figures 9.8 and 9.9 provide two example posters from a student project that aimed to develop a web site to statistically analyse various kinds of data. Ignoring the content of the posters, they provide a contrasting example of bad and good poster design. While both posters are based on the same project and say much the same thing in terms of content, the way they have presented this information is vastly different. Figure 9.8 shows a badly designed poster. The layout is poor – consisting of a number of sections of text. There are no images or diagrams to break up the poster. There is little white space. There are spelling mistakes notably in the title. The poster uses a number of different fonts and font size is too small in many cases. Perhaps worst of all is the colour scheme – the white on black text is intense and the section with the white on pale blue is unreadable. In contrast, Figure 9.9 shows a better presentation of the same material. The layout has been split into three columns with a header section containing the title and author. A consistent font Arial is used throughout and 20-point type has been used for the smallest text. The main title is produced in 110-point type while the sub-headings are in 100 point. The background is generally pale with the text presented in a contrasting dark 240 Chapter 9 n Presentation skills type. Figures and pictures are used to make the poster more appealing and there is plenty of white space. This poster was produced using Microsoft PowerPoint with the page set to A0 size. While this poster might not win a design competition, it is much more read- able than the previous version. Figures 9.10, 9.11 and 9.12 present three more examples of student posters. These posters were presented at a departmental poster competition for postgraduate students. Of the 30 or so posters presented at the competition, these three caught the eye most. The first is very clear in its layout and flow; the second provides a lot of detail but has some interesting images to break up the text and the third which won the poster competition has a very interesting, clear layout with a themed pre- sentation style.

9.3.8 Software

There are a number of software packages available to produce posters. You can use specialist desktop publishing packages such as QuarkXpress, Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Publisher. Alternatively, use graphics or drawing packages to piece together your poster. Examples include CorelDraw, OmniGraffle, FreeHand, and SmartDraw. A less sophisticated approach might be to develop your poster in a word processing package such as Microsoft Word. The examples in this chapter used Microsoft PowerPoint. This allowed text and graphics to be inserted on the page, Figure 9.9 Example of a three-column poster with a coloured background