9 Mistakes You Should Avoid in Your Next Academic Poster
If you submit to a high-rank AI conference chances are that you will only be given a poster presentation as there are way too many submissions to present them all orally. Posters are an important tool for academic researchers to communicate their work to others in their field. By presenting your findings on a poster, you can receive feedback from your peers, learn about new research, and make new contacts. And while posters can be a great opportunity, they can also turn into the opposite if a poster is presented poorly.
I just returned from CVPR2022 a few months ago and have seen a lot of posters. Some were great, others not so much. With this article, I want you to avoid making the mistakes that I have seen way too often.
1. Too much information.
You cannot put all information on your poster. Instead, this is what your paper is for. For your poster, try to focus on the most important aspects of your work and highlight those. Your poster should be a visual addition to your talk at the poster session. I prefer to keep my posters without much text and instead guide interested visitors through my poster. However, that is only possible if you are next to your poster. If you are not constantly in front of your poster, consider making everything self-contained and self-explanatory by providing descriptive text. Either way, avoid adding paragraphs from your paper — they are probably way too long.
2. Too much math.
Math is incredibly helpful in describing things precisely, but some concepts might be hard to grasp immediately and not everybody is fluent in formal notation - especially after a long conference day when your visitors are tired because they have already seen hundreds of other posters. Your poster should be a visual addition to your talk at the poster session. If you can formulate your statement in natural language then do that instead. If you absolutely need to add math then keep it as concise as possible and remember to explain your notation.
3. Not using logical and easy-to-follow structure and organization.
Most conferences suggest using a three-column style with the motivation at the top left and the conclusion at the bottom right. Don’t go all over the poster with your content. Additionally, try to maintain a common thread and story throughout your poster. Highlight important messages.
Personally, I like to include “take-home messages” at the end which briefly outline your most important findings or contributions.
4. Not designing your poster for the specific audience you will be presenting to.
Keep in mind who your audience is. If you are presenting at a large AI venue there is no point in explaining what deep learning is. However, e.g. if you are at a physics conference it may very well be necessary to explain what a convolutional neural network is and does.
5. Using the wrong poster size.
Most conferences will tell you what size and orientation your poster should be. Follow it! It will look odd if your poster differs from the rest. E.g. at CVPR posters were supposed to be 2m x 1m, which is pretty large. In comparison, posters printed e.g. in A0 size looked tiny and were easily missed. On the other hand, if your poster is too large it may not fit the poster board.
6. Not proofreading your poster before printing or presenting it.
Typos and grammar errors can negatively influence a viewer's perception of your work. Check your poster multiple times and pass written text through advanced spell/grammar checks like Grammarly.
7. Using low-quality or illegible images.
Keep in mind that most posters will be significantly larger than your screen. Anything that is low-res on your screen will be even worse in print. So, try to provide images as vector graphics whenever possible or use the largest possible resolution possible and turn off compression. This also applies to the logos in your header/footer section!
8. Not using a consistent style throughout the poster.
Most organizations or conference venues will provide templates/style guides for posters. Consider following them. In particular, don’t mix different fonts and font sizes. Choose a legible classic font. Keep the amount of color minimal. Try to keep it as simple as possible.
9. Forgetting your poster.
Yep, that happens. It also happened in my group. So better double-check after leaving airplanes, trains, buses, etc. if you still have your poster tube. If you really forget your poster, there are usually express printing shops that can print your poster in a few hours (of course at an increased expense), or, non-recommended, but still better than nothing: Tile your poster and print it with a regular printer at your hotel.
What was your experience like with academic posters? Did I miss something? Do you disagree? Feel free to let me know in the comments.
