Design Elements

This section describes elements of an effective poster. It is divided into pages for Content, Design and Layout, and Graphics.

This section also includes a poster evaluation checksheet to help you increase your awareness of and skill in designing posters, along with examples of posters that you can use for evaluation practice.

Content | Design and Layout | Graphics | Evaluation Checksheet | Examples

Content

Clear Purpose

Clearly state the purpose of your poster. If you don't clearly state what your purpose is, you probably don't know what it is. And if you don't know what your purpose is, you don't know what you are trying to communicate.

Your purpose also needs to be clear to your audience. If your audience doesn't know what you are trying to communicate, they will lose interest.

Relevant and Significant

Your poster needs to be relevant to your intended audience, and the information in it needs to be relevant to your stated purpose.

The information should be significant, or of value to your intended audience. If the information is trivial or if it is common knowledge, it is probably not worth putting it into a poster.

Essential

Is all the information in the poster essential to your message?

Posters are not the same as research papers. Posters are intented to boil down a project or topic to its bare essentials, not provide details or supporting documentation. If some of your information is relevant but not essential to your main points, don't include it. Consider putting non-essential "nice to know" information in a supplementary handout.

Organized

Good organzation is key to good communication. Good organization involves breaking down your content into logical categories. Organize your information into major sections. For example, a poster describing a quantitative study might include section headings such as:

• Background or Introduction
• Purpose or Objectives
• Methods or Procedures
• Results
• Conclusions
• Lessons Learned or Future Plans

Break down the major sections into subtopics or bulleted paragraphs.

Clear and Concise

• Boil down information into bullet points where possible.
• Avoid wordiness and jargon.
• Use active voice.
• Use vocabularly that your audience understands
• Spell Out Acronyms The First Time You Use Them (SOATFTYUT).

Let's Practice!

Note: The following links will appear in a new browser window. Close that window to return to this tutorial.

Here's an example of a poster that needs improvement.

Using the checksheet, evaluate the poster.

Here's a better version to compare with the first version. 

Here are our comments on the first version of the poster.