Skip to Main Content

Presenting Your Research: Research Posters and Presenting to Different Audiences

Learn how to effectively communicate your research, either on a poster at a conference or verbally in a different setting. Topics include basic design principles, best poster practices, general design tool options and more.

Graphs & Graphics

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. 
     

Resources