This Friday my class of second year Environmental Health Science Master of Public Health students are going to get my admittedly quirky annual lecture on crating poster presentations. Quirky, because I’m a little obsessive about the importance of story telling in posters, whether you are presenting research data or describing what you did last summer.
Soup to Nuts Poster Creation in Two and a Half Minutes
I’ve been using a rather old (and not very interesting) poster to teach this for the past couple of years, and so this year I thought I’d generate some new material. And just for kicks, I decided to try and capture the whole messy process of creating a poster, from start to finish.
This is what it looks like, compressed into two and a half minutes! For all I know, I’m the only one that does things this way – but it works for me!
Story Telling
As with other forms of communication, I try and tell stories through posters – whether they are reporting on scientific research, presenting the results of a project or capturing an experience. People respond to stories (or “narratives”), irrespective of the subject – it’s a powerful technique for conveying information and helping ideas to stick and resonate.
To me, a poster presentation for me is an aid for story telling – to be used by an in-person narrator. The reality though is that sometimes the poster needs to be able to at least hint at that story without your in-person input. This creates something of a design-conflict. But even with this conflict, I find it helps to think about how every element of the process and the design enhances how the poster conveys information – from the broad themes all the way down to the use of color, white space, and specific fonts.
Creative processes are messy
This video is intentionally scrappy – that’s what my process is like. I start by clarifying the main theme of the poster (using YouTube for informal education on the science of risk in this case), then brainstorming around that. I intentionally place ideas in random places on paper or a whiteboard so that I don’t get trapped into linear thinking, and trying to fit the ideas to a pre-conceived structure.
Once the main ideas have been captured, I start to cluster them together, looking for emerging patterns and linkages. These inform the final narrative structure that I use in the poster. This is the point at which I can start to add in things that I may have missed initially.
When I have this structure and the associated material, I begin to plan what the poster will look like. The first stage is to sketch out a design by hand, so I have an idea of where I’m going before opening the dreaded PowerPoint (or more usually for me, Keynote). Only then do I power up the computer and start to design the poster, based around the initial ideas and sketches.
In this exercise, I included two poster designs here based on the initial brainstorming. In part this was to illustrate how the process of thinking through the story can help drive the final design, rather than allowing a preconceived design constrain the story.
A Conventional Look
Conventional poster design. Click for full size.
The first design is a relatively conventional one (and, to be honest, a little boring). The narrative is reasonably linear, moving down the columns from left to right. It’s a design that enables someone to follow the plot without too many prompts. Boring, but functional – and it’s important to remember that the purpose is to tell a story, not to wow the audience with flash. The design also allows a narrator to use the material in adapting the story to specific audiences – in particular, the central panel describing the process of creating a Risk Bites video enables specific narratives to fit the moment.
While this is a somewhat dull design, it nevertheless includes a number of important design considerations. Font styles and sizes have been chosen to enhance the narrative rather than distracting from it. Graphics have been included where they support the story. White space has been used to ensure key elements of the narrative stand out clearly. Obsessive attention has been paid to alignment and language – the sorts of elements that may not register consciously, but nevertheless interfere with the effectiveness with which the poster conveys the story.
Getting More Radical
More radical poster design. Click for full size.
The second design is more radical, and was primarily developed as an aid to story telling. It’s harder for someone to follow the story here without help. But with a narrator, the poster provides a powerful resource for weaving an audience-specific narrative from the key elements. By placing the main theme in the center and surrounding it with key elements, the narrator can create a narrative within an established framework on the fly, moving from sector to sector as appropriate. The narrative is simultaneously constrained, focused and responsive.
This is a much bolder design in how it uses color and graphical elements. Even so, each element has a purpose in enhancing the narrative.
Story Telling Matters
Neither of these poster designs is stunning – there are lots of tweaks that would need to be applied before I was completely satisfied. But they do illustrate the idea of telling stories through poster presentations – a skill that is just as important for presenting data as it is for pitching a new idea.