Adding visuals to your poster is highly recommended as it helps reduce the amount of text, appeals to people as visual learners, and makes your poster engaging. However, there is a right and a wrong way to add graphs and graphics. Follow these general do's and don't 's:
Do:
- Display quantitative results as a graph instead of a table
- Add annotations to graphs and charts to give people more context without referring them to a block of text
- Use high resolution images in their original scale
- Remove unnecessary backgrounds to graphs or images to improve flow
- Cite images that do not belong to you.
- Create Alt-text (for posters presented digitally) and captions for images.
Don't:
- use a lot of superfluous graphics or images. Stick with images that truly contribute to explaining your research
- Try to fit your data into an inappropriate graph or chart. Graphs have specific use cases and inappropriate using them lessens the value of your research and confuses readers.
- Stretch images (change their width or height ratios) to fit. This distorts the image and makes it look bad. Crop or resize the image instead.
- Use screenshots, or blurry or pixelated images. Download the content in the appropriate format (like a jpg, png) and with the highest resolution that you can.