Poster Design and the Viewer Perspective

Abstract

This chapter examines the use of posters to give a visual representation of an issue and to facilitate dialogue between the presenter and their audience. It presents a chronological history of poster compilation and offers advice on compiling traditional and electronic posters, with an emphasis on using nonspecialist design platforms. While most poster guidance centers on how the poster looks from an author perspective, this chapter considers how a poster may look to others. A main principle of poster design is to attract attention, but in the conference setting, there are predictable issues that limit this taking place. In particular, theories of conference fatigue and thin-slice judgment offer some explanations as to why posters tend to attract only limited amounts of attention, and these themes carry through into the following chapters on visual perception and compilational design. Overall, however, there is a clearly emergent pattern that suggests that the success of a poster lies only partly in its compilational design and perhaps more so in the elements that influence how we perceive and interact with large bodies of presented information.