Nail the First Impression

What do the three posters below have in common?

It may have taken you a minute or two, but I'm sure you noticed that all three posters above use a photo as a background instead of the traditional white or colored space background that is typically used on posters. As you can see, it’s a great way to add a visual component to your poster but it also increases what I like to call the 'viewing efficiency'. Viewing efficiency is the measure of how easy it is to see, read, and digest everything on an academic poster. Viewing efficiency is the critical factor that determines whether a conference attendee chooses to walk up to your poster or the poster next to it. By adding an image as the background of your poster, you can achieve multiple objectives with a single technique. Let me explain how this works.

Let's look at the poster with the frog on it. The frog is the first thing you see even before you read the title.  You know this poster is about frogs before you read the content. In fact, even if you did read the title it probably doesn’t help much. This author did an excellent job of making it easier for her/his audience to understand their topic by communicating with an image instead of forcing you to read into the poster. Not only do you know that this poster is about frogs, but if it was displayed in an exhibit hall, surrounded by a sea of text-laden posters with shaded columns, you’d probably walk up to this one first. This is because 90% of the information we process is visual while the other 10% comes from the other four senses. Humans can process visual information 60,000 times faster than written text. Researchers report that the average human attention span is less than a goldfish and has decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013.
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Remember, conference attendees want to see your research, not read it.