(apologies if this post isn’t super clear — I just wanted to get it out)
I haven’t posted in ages, but I am at a conference, I can’t sleep, and something is on my mind, so I figured I’d strike while the iron is hot.
I’m at the 2010 Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Fellows Conference in Washington D.C. This evening I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for a poster competition. The current fellows present posters on their graduate research. The poster topics shared the theme of “computational science”, but besides that they can be from any discipline. I’m not going to discuss the specifics of the posters here.
The basic criteria we judged posters on were visual, oral, and impact.
To me, there are fundamental rules governing effective poster design. For example, in the visual category, use no paragraphs of text, and large fonts (even in figures), and well balanced graphics. In the oral category, have a 3 minute speech prepared, and refer to the poster when delivering that speech. I was surprised, however, how other judges had vastly different values when evaluating the work submitted. Most specifically, some judges felt that work of high scientific quality could compensate for poor poster presentation.
Have you ever designed or seen a scientific poster? If so, what do you think are the most important criteria for evaluating this sort of work?
Half Awake 