What great communicators understand is that attention cannot be divided (although it can shift quickly). The same is true for your conscious working memory.
For you, this means: if you fail to decide what your viewer should focus on, your content will feel crowded, confusing, or pretentiously artistic.
One “Result” Only
Guide yourself by starting at the top of the hierarchy: what is the one main result you want to present?
Of course, most projects yield several results. However, you must decide what your take-home message is.
My tip: if you can express it in one sentence, you’re good to go.
Once you have that, design choices become much easier. But the next question is: how do you order your data so it guides the reader through your work?
The Art of Storytelling
How often do we hear from half-baked science communicators how important storytelling is…
I include this depiction to show that the common Motivation – Obstacle – Solution framework is an oversimplification. The idea of the "Hero’s Journey" comes from a storytelling tradition in human culture. To use the power of storytelling in science, understand why the Hero’s Journey structure works so well emotionally.
The challenge is that very few understand what storytelling really means. And especially for scientists, I’d argue we need to remember this credo:
Don’t try to tell your story - tell a story.
The issue with telling your story is that you’ll tend to crowd your content. You have emotional ties to every dataset, making it hard to cut things out.
Moreover, people don’t really care about what happened to you - they care about the transformation, the challenge overcome, and the implications.
Therefore, select the elements of your story that can be woven into a clear progression: from question, through evidence, to implications. Again, all aiming at one single take-away in the end.
Leave parts out, highlight selectively, and follow one line of results. That is generally far more effective than cramming everything onto your poster.
Write with Purpose
And then there is the text… While the Background and Methods are straightforward, the other sections cause more difficulties.
Many scientists get carried away by wanting to be exhaustive. That overloads both their own brains and their readers’.
Click to enlarge. I often end up cutting half of my original script and a third of the edited version. Yes, that is quite a lot - but having people read the most essential parts of your work is far better than having nobody read it at all. In the example above, you can see what I would have cut—until I decided to leave this section out entirely. Painful? Yes…
Especially in your poster, you want to convey three things:
Presentation & Explanation – What interpretation should the viewer make of your data?
Proof – Why should they trust this data?
Implication – What does this mean for them or for the field?
To put your proof into perspective, in addition to the data points and associated statistics, you can add a few words to explain or position your setup.
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