Any frequent flyer at medical conferences has seen them while absentmindedly strolling the poster aisles – the occasional overworked poster crammed with too much text, multiple tables and multiple figures.
As a bonus, some posters feature fluoro colours, images as watermarks or a font size that requires the use of surgical loupes.
Visual assault aside, the problem with overblown posters is that the valuable content gets lost.
Dr Tullio Rossi, a former marine biologist now science communicator, told the limbic the busy poster is overwhelming for the viewer and they move on. The opportunity to share the findings are lost.
“Researchers want to show it all. You’ve done all the work. You’re proud of all the graphs you’ve produced and all the results you’ve got so you put it all on your PowerPoint slides or on your poster and then it completely backfires because it’s counterproductive to show everything.”
“You could have the best content ever but if you show too much you turn people off; you literally scare them off.”
While many conference organisers issue poster guidelines, Dr Rossi said word and graph limits should probably be enforced.
He said one of the worst ideas is an adding an abstract to a poster.
“The poster as a whole is the visual version of that abstract. So there is absolutely no point in slapping on a 200 to 250 word block of text as an abstract on a poster.”