Designing a Research Poster
All HSD students and their faculty supervisors are invited to present their research at the annual HSD Research Day!
If you want to present a research poster, please email hsdrcpd@uvic.ca with your name, affiliation, supervisor name, and poster title no later than April 25th, 2022.
The research poster has two main purposes with the first flowing from the second. First, it is an opportunity for you to tell others about your research, the work you did and the cool findings that emerged. The second purpose of the research poster is to entice someone walking past your poster to stop and ask you questions about your research. Thus, in order to share your work with others, you first need to capture their attention so that they will stop to read more and ask question. Think of it like designing a billboard. Imagine someone quickly driving down the road while listening to music. Your job is to design your poster in a way that the person driving by notices your billboard and, within seconds, knows what you're selling. Your poster needs to quickly communicate the scope and findings of your research so that folks walking by will stop to ask questions.
To help you achieve the goal of capturing a passerby’s attention, we've put together a variety of resources and events intended to help you design an easy-to-understand, eye-catching research poster.
Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.
Hans Hoffman
Our HSD Associate Dean Research (Acting), Dr. Hokulani Aikau and the HSD Research Support Centre Team will be hosting two 'drop-in' Poster Presentation coaching sessions (via Zoom). Simply log in either one of the two sessions, bring your ideas, thoughts and questions. The team will be your sounding board and will offer suggestions, affirmations, or just act as a second a pair of eyes to review what you have prepared.
Check out these traditional poster resources.
- UVic Scientific Poster Templates - three different design styles
- Blink Printing Poster Presentation Guidelines
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After checking out the standard resources, be brave and check out this video that shows a different way of developing a research poster based on brain research and industrial design.
In sum, practise good design by using:
- brief, accurate text in easy-to-read chunks and written to a high school reading level
- simple, high-resolution figures and graphs
The alternative to good design is always bad design. There is no such thing as no design.
Adam Judge