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Alrighty. Thank you everyone for joining in today on this webinar on how to build um a lovely poster and I'm sure a lot of you have already done this. So it might be quite simplistic, but I think the highlight of this webinar is gonna be that got a couple of posters to show you and we're gonna kind of dissect what's wrong with them and what's good about them and how we can make it better. OK? Um Just to start off, if the, if you have any questions midway, you can put them down in the chat, I'll be checking it every once in a while. So if I don't reply immediately, don't freak out, I haven't forgotten about you. Um And if the audio is a problem or the video is a problem, also put it down in the chat and I will try my best to fix. It might be a bit shaky on this one because they've kind of changed the platform a little bit, but let's give it a shot. So let's just look at the learning objectives first before I give you a little quiz. So learn the important sections to include in a poster presentation, which will be quite obvious to everyone that we'll go through that pretty quickly and understand why it's important and how to optimize the different sections in the poster because that's where people tend to go wrong and that's why our poster can fall flat. So we're gonna try not to do that today. OK. Now we're just going to head over to a little pre quiz because that allows me to see how well you learn from the post quiz. Let me just get this started really quickly and let me share a screen. So you should be able to see my screen right now and the code is up there, which I will also type in to the chat for people here. Uh So it's giving you a link there and the code is there you go and then the codes in there. Um Don't worry, I, I just saw that question. Don't worry, I will be telling you what a poster is. Uh But let's do this quiz first. We're doing it before so I can compare it to the results after. So once a few people join in, I'll hit start. OK? Thank you for joining the, the quiz on this one is quite easy compared to previous webinars I've done. So don't be afraid there's no winning or losing. Give it a couple of seconds for a few more of you to join in cause there's quite a few of you here today actually just give it your best shot at this point. Um Wait for one more just cause five is a nice number. There we go, Mr Train. Let's get started. So no speed. Take your time. You have 20 seconds to read the answer options and answer. Oh, quick voting. Let's have a look at the answers. Good. Yeah, the majority got it right. Perfect. And we'll talk about what an abstract is as well and what you need to do for it and why you need to do it before poster. So moving on seven players, let's get started again. No speed points. Just keep it going. See the knot in big letters. This one's harder, isn't it? Oh wow. Six out of six. Excellent. This is, this is great. So it'll be much easier today then. All righty. Let me reshape my tab. Perfect. This is where it takes a bit of time because they've changed how they do it. But all right, you should be able to see my screen right now if you can't pop it down in the chat and I'm watching the chat. So don't worry. So we'll start off with why you care about posters and it's because you need to present one at some point or the other in your medical career. Whether you doing research, whether you want it for the specialty application points and like uh the participant asked in the chat, what a poster is. It's I think it's in here. Yeah. What is a poster? There you go. Um It's a visual presentation of the most important findings of a piece of work to an audience and this is different with talk because a talk, you can go through slides, you can have animations and videos. Whereas a poster, it's just a piece of paper. Essentially not a for it's a massive piece of paper which you print out, you normally design it on powerpoint and you print it out and it would contain the most salient pieces of information from your work. And we'll talk about how important it is to pick the right information. And so it's usually in a large hall or a or a meeting room with other people who have posters as well and you're all presenting at the same time, which is why it can be a bit nerve wracking because it's talented people around you presenting their work as well. And the audience will move around and ask you questions um as you stand there and try to answer them, they're also presented at conferences and people see each poster for quite a short duration because they move around quite a lot. So it must be gripping. You have to be able to stand out in that 23 minutes so that people remember it later. Um And how do we do that? What we're gonna find out today? I hope so. Abstract. Why did we talk about abstract? In the question because to get your poster selected for a conference, you need to first submit an abstract, they read through the abstract, see whether it's uh appropriate for that particular conference and they judge the quality and merit of the work and then they'll decide whether they want to give you a poster presentation or not. So an abstract, the sections of an abstract, uh we're going to go through this quickly because this is not a webinar to do with abstracts, but it's essentially the same as you'll see in as the sections in a poster. The introduction, which should only contain background information required to understand what you've written in the abstract. It doesn't need to contain all the background information for the entire project you've done because an abstract is tiny. It's about 2 50 to 300 words. You cannot fit an entire piece of research or a quip or an audit um into that amount of space. You have to focus on the most important result you found in your work and introduce that. But it should include aims and objectives just to give it a clear structure and guide towards going methods. Again, only methods for what you did, what you're going to talk about in the abstract and future poster. And you don't need extreme amounts of detail there. You just need enough for the reader to understand what you've done and how you've done it, especially if you've done something quite unusual. And then the results section here, again, the most critical results from your work don't delve into the tiny little details that are interesting to you, but they might not be interesting to the large audience. And then finally, the discussion and conclusion which should highlight uh the impact of the work in the future and a few of the limitations there. The most important section here I would say is the results and discussion. OK? And we'll see in the poster, what's the most important section as well? You have a good guideline now about what an abstract is and how to kind of work it up from a larger project and percolate it down into a smaller little summary called the abstract. And then you submit it and wait and hope for the best. So what are the sections of the poster? So I'm gonna explain the slide because we're gonna be carrying on with this format on the right. You will see an example poster. I hope you can see it because posters tend to be quite big and long that it's hard to kind of fit it on a powerpoint slide. But we're we're trying so have a look comment while we're on this particular slide, comment in the chat. What you think is wrong with the slide. And then after I go through the slide, we'll talk about the points in the chat. So this is I've obtained this from a colleague of mine and it's a project they did um a quip and they wanted to do a poster on it and this was their first draft so savage. It honestly say what's good. Say what's bad. I'm gonna talk about that as well. So don't be afraid. But I'm using this to uh highlight the sections of a poster to start with. As you'll notice they're the same as the sections in an abstract and they should mirror what you've written in your abstract and submitted to the conference for judging if it doesn't, they might get a bit weird about it. So don't try to trick them or anything like that. But again, in this part, I would say the results are the most important section because that's where most of your diagrams will be and that's what makes it poster visual and interesting to look at. So hopefully, that gave you some hints about what's wrong with this poster. This draft of this poster, I should say um and all the same other rules apply for the different sections. Only introduce material you will discuss or talk about in your poster, only give the methods for what you've done in the poster, only discuss very briefly the the reason you did the work and not the reason you did the work actually the impact your work will have on the field or in the future. And this should also have references, the poster should have references. But in a tiny font at the bottom. Uh which uh it's, it's been cut off slightly in this example here, but it should definitely have it, but in a much tinier font. So it doesn't occupy that much space because you need all the space you can get here. So I'm going to look at the chart right now. So comment whatever you think is wrong or great about this poster. Mhm OK. I'll give it a couple of minutes cause there's, there's a question but it's not to do with this slide. I will answer that question before I move on. But I'm just gonna wait for other people to comment about the poster right now. That's on this slide. So don't be shy. Uh There's no wrong answers here. Thank you, Alejandra. We're getting, we're getting there. Very tech heavy. You are indeed correct, Sonia. Thank you. Exactly. Too much text. So you guys are getting it. Vis visuals are quite important and because no one's gonna read that much text. Biggers are too small. Good. Yeah, perfect. Because we, we again, we mentioned a bit of visual before, but if no one can see your images, what's the point of having them there? Exactly. Um Perfect. Good. OK. I'm gonna answer the previous question first. So Emma to do a poster, you do not need to have written a paper like a literature review and then do a poster based on it. So for that specific example, for literature review. Um You, I guess you would have had to have done the review to, to be able to have the information to do the poster. You're right, but you don't have to have it published. You have to do the body of work first. The body of work doesn't need to be published um to be able to do a poster. That's kind of what I meant from that. I hope that helped. Um Alejandra also said no graphs so difficult to see the result. Yes, I was just gonna mention that uh they hadn't put their graphs in yet. So I, I don't think we can blame them because I saw this draft quite early. Um OK. So again, don't forget if you have any questions, keep putting them in the chat, but for now we're gonna move on and what you're gonna see is uh a gradual improvement in the poster based on what we've talked about. So the main things we've mentioned so far are text heavy images are too small. So let's see what the authors did to improve upon that. Improvements. Oh, sorry, you skipped a little bit. OK. Type in what improvements you see and whether they're enough and what the problems are now. So I've highlighted some of the improvements there, but please feel free to put down your own. There are better diagrams the graphs are in um And that other diagram in the methods section is in the previous slide there were a lot of tiny diagrams. Now, there's only one tiny diagram and there's not overlaid with itself. You still can't read it even if it was printed out to real size. So I guess that's space for more improvement, but it's definitely better than before. And in terms of text, I think it is cut down slightly. Or at least they've tried to bullet point now, which I'm going to highlight over and over and over again. Bullet points are your best friend for posters and oral talks, which will be my next webinar. But it just makes things bite size and easier to digest as you read, especially when you're reading 20 posters in a single day. Ok, I'm gonna wait on the chat again, but I won't wait too long this time because it's not that big a difference and I guess it'll be quite similar comments right now. Well, thank you guys for being engaging and keep it up. Um, agree with your comments. Thank you Alejandro. Um And to answer your question, Emma yes, it does involve doing some research on the topic, then writing it in the form and then instead of writing in the form of a pa paper, you're doing it in the form of a poster. Yes, but that doesn't mean you can't also submit it as a poster or as an oral talk. So it do, it shouldn't um limit you in any way unless the conference has a specific rule on that or the journal you're trying to submit the relevant paper to has a specific rule on that. For example, you might need to disclose that it's been presented at this conference in this year. Ok. So we're seeing improvements. We're seeing better quality diagrams and bullet pointing. So what happens in draft three more diagrams? Yay, I'm gonna say nothing. I'll talk about methods, diagrams later, but please comment on what you think was improved. I'll give you time for this one cause I've said nothing man. Think about how you'd feel if you saw that poster live at a conference. Definitely less text. Yes, indeed. And that makes it more pleasant. Um More bullet points. Yup. Perfect. Good, good larger diagram. Easy to understand and read more diagrams some bullet points. Exactly. Again, I'm gonna keep highlighting how important diagrams are. People don't remember text when you're looking at a poster in real life, you're kind of your inner dialogue is reading the text out loud to yourself. You don't remember that as well as you remember a picture you've seen in front of you. Most posters you go to will have diagrams for results. They'll be complicated diagrams which is a negative as well there, I'll talk about that in a second but they don't usually have too many diagrams or methods unless this person is pretty good at doing posters and I have seen some of those, but the majority no methods tend to be complicated. So having a diagram or a flow chart in about what you've done, makes it so much easier to work out how you got to the end goal from the start. And that makes it easier to understand your results and even replicate it if they want to. So I would definitely recommend methods, diagrams. Um something in the chat, let me look uh easier to follow exactly. And it kind of almost because of the arrows gives a natural flow to the poster, which is really important flow in structure are things that make it easier for us to compartmentalize information and remember it and recall it. So it's essential to give that to the reader Sarah. The theme background is pretty plain, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. We'll actually talk about theme and aesthetics pretty soon. So good job for picking up on that. Um I will talk about what make whether plain is good or bad. Exactly that actually. But move coming back to diagrams really quickly. Don't more diagrams is are better and use diagrams whenever it's appropriate to do. So, for example, don't put diagrams in the introduction, usually because it's not going to add that much additional information compared to text because it's not something that can be converted into a graphic that encapsulates the same amount of information, use a diagram when it conveys more information in a better way than the text would. OK. Keep that in mind. It's quite important. Can't just be having a poster with only diagrams in it doesn't work and make sure the quality of the diagrams are good. They shouldn't be too complicated when you look at it immediately, you should be able to in the 1st 3 to 4 seconds work out what's going on in the diagram, which is why I said some posters tend to have very complicated graphs with many different trend lines, many different statistics on them. No posters should be specific and focus on a s couple or three results at the maximum. Or if you have multiple lines, highlight the most important trend in a certain color and gray out the other trends, they can be there. And if the person is interested in them, they can look at them but very clearly show them, which is the main uh trend line you want them to remember or for to come across. It's quite graying things out is quite a useful tool in making figures in uh posters and oral presentations to kind of spotlight what you're trying to show. Um Yeah. OK. That's pretty good diagrams. A negative I would say here is that they've used Excel very clearly to draw their diagrams and the color trends, the color patterns are not good for colorblind. People try to use blues and oranges or any other colorblind friendly palette because you don't know your audience. Um And yeah, it's better to be inclusive there. Um And don't make your graphs in Excel, please use a professional program like graph pad Prism makes better graphs, better statistics. Um Yeah, and that's it. Quality over, quality over quantity and quantity over text. That's the summary from the diagram section I would say so. Moving on. Oh and now we're just gonna talk about aesthetic and text. I think this was very close to the final draft, which is why we might not have any other drafts in there. Um I don't know if I put one side by side from start to finish, which I should have in hindsight. But yeah, so now uh I think Sarah was, it was talking about the background and we're gonna talk about that. Now, the aesthetic is super important in any visual work color scheme and theme are extremely important to get not only your point across but to make it pleasing to the reader or the audience to kind of accept the information. So I would recommend keeping the background quite plain and neutral but headings and diagrams, for example, should have a very specific color palette. Um I wasn't able to show the logo and the top in the title area for this poster, but you can see that the title is in a blue background, the background is blue and the title is in white. And then the image on the left of the title is all in white and that clashes. You shouldn't have different colors layered on top of each other. Please don't do that. It's just dissonant for the eyes. Um Keep everything harmonized. If you're using blues and oranges, stick to blues and oranges throughout. Don't have grafts in green or diagrams with pink in them. Like one of my teachers said in the past, I don't wanna need sunglasses to look at your poster. So keep it simple. Um and keep and have a color pal in, in design terms, I guess we could say uh makes it pleasant to the eye. More people will remember it for being just for aesthetics and theme and that'll help them remember your work as well and remember you, it's all about reputation at the end of the day, I guess. Um and text, there's still lots of texts and paragraphs very clear, but there's also a clear improvement and the use of bullet pointing is very good. Uh But so and so this might still be a negative here. I would still try to cut it down further um especially in the method section there because it's very unlikely people are gonna try and reproduce this just from a poster because you can't get enough across in the methods anyways. So there's no point of putting that extra text there, especially since you have a diagram, people can ask you that you kind of guide what questions they come up with in that way as well. You control the narrative. Um But sometimes you will have no choice. You'll have to have text in there. So don't be afraid you don't have to cut it, the text out completely. You will have to have some text there. Um But I, yeah, I think this was the final draft and it, and it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Definitely could be improved, but pretty good. Oh, so we're going to do the next one. A good example. Great. So, well, I've given you the answers there actually, but type in the chat anyways to tell me what you think should be improved. What might not be good in this poster and what is good in this poster? And if you recognize the color theme, you can get bonus points for that if you say it in the chat. Um I'll give it a couple of minutes. I'm looking at the chat right now. Mhm. So don't be afraid just post in what you think is good and what you think is bad about this poster. Would you be happy if this was your poster at a conference? See everything in bullet point? So it seems easy to follow. Thank you. Um Conclusions could be aligned better instead of center but looks good. Overall, I see what you mean. And we, and we definitely did try that and well, maybe I should have had an example where they were aligned to the left or to the right. Uh But again, that's a good point as well. I like the color themes. Thank you. And then there's one that says poor choice of color theme. Thank you for that for your honesty as well. Um And this one actually, it had to be this color theme because for, for the particular university it was um because it matched our logo and things. So uh the greens are a bit weird but the important thing is consistency there where the the donut chart are the same theme. The timeline is in the same theme, the grays are maintained through the diagrams like Alejandro said, exactly quite a consistent layout. That's the point. Um bullet points are impressive. Thank you. It's just easier when you have four and you know, you need to know four. It makes it easier for the speaker as well. You don't have a mass of information and when you forget something, you can always glance back and kind of know which bullet point you're looking for and extract that information very quickly. And yeah, we've, we tried to keep, I, I guess this uh I was involved in this poster. Um but sometimes um of course, not all the there were quite a few other people, four or five other people involved in this poster as well. So your decisions might not always be the final say, but that's I guess another important thing to learn about making posters and presentations is teamwork is important. You have to compromise in some places. Um, font size looks a little small. I don't remember what it was actually. Um, but again, yeah, in full size it probably wouldn't be too small. Hopefully it might have been and then we'd have to change it. But just, I guess that brings up an important point change is not always a bad thing. Um, figuring out something's wrong means you can make it right. Um, ok, let's move on. Oh I guess we have the summary then. So to summarize, keep the look of the poster, aesthetic and clean, clean and consistent. That's what I said, clean and consistent. You can use premade templates to start off with for practice. Um And so it comes with a color palette and places to put your results and things, but those often have lots of text boxes. So be aware of that and know to delete the text boxes and replace them with images when it's appropriate to do. So. Um use a phone that's easy to read and print like aerial. Don't use times new Roman or any funky curly fonts that it's just not fun to read. Less is more like it's probably come across through the examples, less text, more images um focus on the most important points. Uh That's number three, I guess only include the most key findings and a diagram is worth 1000 words, a quality diagram replacing appropriate text. OK. Excellent. So if you have any questions actually, before the questions, we'll do the post webinar quiz. So just give me two seconds to share that screen. Let me just open it up here. OK? You should be able to see my screen right now and I'm gonna put the voting link in the chat as well. Sarah, I will get back to your question in a second. Let's do the quiz first. I promise that question is not in the quiz. All righty. I've also put the code in the chart and the link. So OK, easy peasy. Only two questions. It's not that stressful today, but it might be, I don't know. OK, five people, six people. Excellent. Let's get started. Eight people. Wow, we have a party here today. All righty. Oh no, we skipped a question. Sorry, go back to question one. No speed points. So take your time. I'm starting you off easy today right away. Think about it. I've actually mentioned this multiple times over the course of this uh presentation. So hopefully he's come across. Thank you for the person who's giving me thumbs up for the majority if you got it right. So the reason it's not always in the methods and results section is because sometimes you can't, you can't put the words in the method section into images. You just won't find the correct images to do it. And then you have to, you end up with bullet points and sometimes result sections need tables where you can't use diagrams there. Um And when there's too much text generally, yes, but like I said, not all text can be an image like introductions, for example. Um I was gonna mention something else to you guys that car. They'll come back to me. Next question. 13 players. I you're making me happy guys again. No speed points. Which section of the poster is the most crucial? Let's see. Good work everyone. Yeah, results is the most useful section because well, you can't have a discussion without the results and the discussion is quite tiny in a poster. Actually you just want a couple of points there. Um an introduction. No, because it is important but with you, it's not as important as the as the results because the results are the point you're trying to get across. Whereas the introduction is the kind of context you could technically still you could technically just provide the results to get across your point, but you can't just provide the introduction to get across your point. OK. Let's get back to it. Just a couple more things to go through for you guys and then we are done, I promise. Mhm OK. Um ah that question, Sarah, I have to get back to you. Oh, so Sarah first, what was the graph software you mentioned earlier? Let me type it in the chat so you can have it down graph pad prism. Um And I think the latest version is 10, I had an update like yesterday. So well, it'll download the most updated version for you anyways. And then next one U Iman you, what software do you use to make? Postage? Usually I use powerpoint. Um But you can use can as well canvas really good. Uh Uh I will come to your question in a second food. Um One other piece of software that's really, really useful for making diagrams is called bio render and they have a free version uh which is really good. I use that in my thesis. So I would definitely recommend it top publication quality diagrams. Um Put that in the chart as well. Um OK. Do you have any specific advice for posters for wet lab research? No, this is all coming from experience mostly to do with wet lab research. Follow the same rules and you'll get there. You might have more technical graphs, we try to spot like your most important features in the graph. Um You might also have more technical methods in all the posters I've done for what lab research I converted them into diagrams which I think is much more friendly to people because when you have complicated equipment or multiple step protocols, it's easier to simplify them down into a flow chart. Um If you have any more questions, keep putting them in the chat, I'm not going anywhere but I will leave open the screen for feedback. That's how you get your certificate. So scan in the QR code and join up on our next webinar to where you'll learn about how to create an oral talk. It's similar to this, but there are some key differences which you want to know about. I'll also put the link for feedback in the chat because that is helpful sometimes and I'll be here for a few more minutes. So just ask me questions and I also for the next webinar. Mhm OK. There you go just in case you're on your phone and can't scan a QR code right now. Um Keep posting in questions, any problems and do give the feedback and join the next webinar, the certificate and more information. And again, I will be going through an actual oral talk that I gave at a conference which will hopefully be quite helpful because um I don't know if you guys found it helpful, but I think having the example posters and this was quite useful. So, yeah, you're welcome, Sarah. You're welcome. I'll leave this on here for a few more minutes. Um And if you do have any questions after the webinar, uh what you can do is I'll put my email on here. Mhm. You're welcome guys. Um Yes, so that's my email. You can contact me on that and I'm pretty quick to replying. So I'll get back to you pretty instantly and this will be on catch up. So you'll be able to catch this on me and youtube later probably tomorrow. Yeah, and I hope that was helpful. You're welcome Alejandro, right? I'll wait till there's less than 10 people and then I will leak. You guys have till then to ask me a few more questions. Oh, and another thing you can use my email for actually is if you're making a poster, you can always send me an example. Um and I can give you some comments on it if, if you want something like that. Um We're going to try to set up a little mentoring service for remind of helping you do exactly that. So we can have a little pilot if you want to do that. Um And we will be hosting a conference next year, hopefully to present posters. So we'll all have the opportunity to submit for that and I would know if you come here. So I guess you get a bit of a perk of me knowing you. You're welcome guys. You're welcome. All righty. I'm gonna head off now. Any last questions from you guys? Sorry, if it was very obvious to a lot of you, I'm sure a lot of you knew all of this stuff before, but just making it clear how important design is to making your poster actually good. All right, if there's no more questions, have a great night guys and a great week and I will see you for the next webinar. I hope you do enjoy