What Is This Poster Even For? My advisor is letting me redesign the poster (the previous version isn’t that bad… isn’t it?) for our paper “Price Stability and Improved Buyer Utility with Presentation Design” (pdf) that’s going to be presented at The Web Conference. Fine.
But, to be fair, he made a solid point.
Yes, there are endless design guidelines and aesthetic choices—softwares (please, don’t use Powerpoint or Word…), color palettes, font choices, the use of white space (oh the cliche ’less is more’), clever placements of shapes and arrows to guide people’s eyeballs, etc etc etc. But what about the practical question: what do we actually want the poster to do?
Our paper is a theory paper being presented at a mostly applied conference. There will be hundreds of posters crammed into a bustling hallway. People will walk by, glance, judge, and in 90% of cases… just keep walking. Not because your research is bad, or your poster isn’t the most beautiful arrangement of LaTeX and Illustrator wizardry ever created. But maybe—just maybe—it’s because your interests and theirs simply don’t align.
So here’s the job of the poster: it’s not to please everyone. It’s to find your people—the 10% who should be interested in your work but don’t yet know it. And in those fleeting few seconds—the first-impression window as they pace past—you need to signal clearly: “this one might actually matter to you.”
If that connection clicks, then maybe they pause. Maybe they read. Maybe they ask a question. Maybe you spark a collaboration—voilà.
The font can be Helvetica. The message needs to be unmistakable.