Designing academic posters, part A.

There are two forms of academic posters which students and ajarns may be asked to help design: announcements for lectures or public presentations and conference posters placed in scholarly gatherings, to highlight and draw attention to their work.

First we will deal with the simpler subject, of planning announcements of lectures or public presentations.

Be prepared.

While it may seem a simple thing to have a poster announce any public event at which you must speak, the details may prove difficult without the proper degree of preparation. For example, everyone in academia who intends to make public appearances, whether an advanced student or ajarn, should have a high-density scan of a color portrait photo stored on Dropbox or some other reliable computer storage device. The absence of any photo, or the need to take one at short notice, may prevent it from being used on any announcement. This would be a drawback, as any photo is better than none. Especially in scholarly subjects which can seem impersonal or dry, it is important to remind the prospective audience that the lecture will be given by a fellow human being. In Thailand, people tend to hang onto their graduation photo or other early image and then use it for the rest of their long university careers. It is common to see decades-old photos of ajarns representing them on faculty websites. This is not from vanity, as when Hollywood stars prefer ancient images of themselves to more recent and realistic ones. Instead, the ajarns simply cannot be bothered to update the images. Still, it is a good idea to have a fairly recent image of yourself to be used on posters and the like, since the purpose is to allow your audience to recognize you when they see you for the first time at the event. Your photo represents you, just as an updated professional resume does.

What to put on the poster.

Starting from the top of any poster and gradually working our way downwards, it is Thai style to put all kinds of unnecessary words on posters, especially those in the English language. For example, Thai posters sometimes say: ANNOUNCEMENT, whereas anyone who looks at a poster realizes that it is announcing something. It is hardly worth taking up precious space to say what is obvious. Likewise, posters in the Kingdom – and elsewhere, sometimes – say LECTURE ANNOUNCEMENT, although the information given in the poster makes it obvious that the purpose of the sign is to announce a lecture. By leaving out the obvious, we gain space for what is essential, such as the sponsoring faculty. A well-designed poster typically begins:

The Faculty of X invites you to a lecture by YY

with the name of the lecturers considerably larger than the information about who has invited them. It is considered respectful to spell out all words such as Professor or Assistant Professor, even though Thai English frequently uses abbreviations such as Asst. Prof. and the like. If we abbreviate these terms, it seems as if we are in such a hurry that we cannot be bothered to write them out in full.

Next should come the friendly color photo of the speaker. Then the title of the lecture, which need not be in quotation marks. The title should also be in very large letters, since the subject as much as who is speaking will attract anyone who eventually does attend. The title should not contain any abbreviations or extremely specialized words only known to experts. Any abbreviations should be fully spelled out, even if that makes the title longer. It will confuse your possible audience if your lecture title has a mysterious abbreviation that has several possible meanings.

What to leave out.

Below the title of the lecture in posters, where and when the lecture takes place is necessary information. In the Kingdom, a wordy abstract of the lecture is often included. This is a big mistake. Putting an abstract on a poster misunderstands the purpose of a lecture announcement poster. This kind of announcement is a very brief and concise announcement of an event, meant to be read and understood by people passing by quickly, who need only basic information from it. Almost no one stands in a hallway or other public place for a long time to study a poster in detail, and article abstracts require concentrated reading. Instead, offer a line or two of key data about what you plan to speak on. Reserve details about your findings, approach, and theories for the actual presentation. Similarly, when asked for a short description of their careers, some speakers either furnish an unedited resume of their full life achievements, or long paragraphs detailing all their jobs since they left university. Traditionally, it may be of public interest where a speaker graduated from, so this information is commonly included:

Having earned a BA degree at Y University and an MA at Z University, speaker B is now working for a doctorate at the Faculty of C at D University.

Or, for an older speaker:

Having earned a BA degree at Y University and an MA at Z University, speaker B is now an associate professor of C at D University.

Please note that it is not important or even interesting to list all of a speaker’s previous jobs on a plain lecture announcement. No one really cares, except for speakers and their family, where they worked in past years. The point is to introduce the speaker as briefly as possible by including information about the present rather than the past.

Finally, at the very bottom of the poster, there is often an email or phone contact for a staffer at the faculty which has invited the speaker, in case further questions arise or details are needed. This is all that a well-prepared lecture or presentation poster need contain. What about all the free space not occupied by a full abstract or a full resume? That space allows the poster designer to experiment with text size, to make the poster readable from a considerable distance. Any experienced poster designer knows that being decorative for its own sake means nothing in a poster; the main idea is to get a message across. For that reason, a readable standard font such as Times New Roman is often preferred for posters and italics are avoided, as well as underlinings or other distracting typographical effects. Black on white print is by far the most legible, so any colors should be avoided, apart from the pleasant colors of the portrait photo of the speaker.

Keeping it simple.

By keeping to a minimalist approach, poster announcements can be highly effective and easy to do. They do require a small amount of preparation, such as lecturers making sure they have a fairly recent color photo portrait, a two-line description of their lecture topic and another two-line description of their education and current employment. Yet Thai universities often prefer to announce lectures with no photo at all, resulting in an unattractive solid block of print that is hard to read, with far too much information than the prospective attendee wants or needs, and other extraneous words. In the case of lecture announcement posters, what is most direct turns out to be best. In part B of this blog entry, we will see that this is true even with the far more complex task of designing posters meant to introduce research materials at academic conferences.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).