JRA Poster Guidelines

Aims of the poster

Posters are a very common way used by researchers, especially among the PhD community, to communicate in a quick and accessible way the key findings of their research. Because of their brevity and visual nature, posters are a useful way of engaging an audience with your research and networking with people doing research in your field.

Bear in mind that posters are usually on display in an exhibition space competing for the attention of the audience.

Hence your aims should be to a) grab the attention of the audience; b) keep their interest as they read or view your poster, and c) provide enough information for the reader/viewer to understand what your research is about and your main findings.

Advice on content

Note that you cannot and should not include every detail from your research. Be selective in what you present so that the reader has a sense of the story that you are telling. You should prepare a poster showing the most important parts of your project which would enable the reader to understand your research topic – AT A GLANCE!

By far the most common criticism of posters is ‘Far Too Many Words’ or ‘Too Much Information’. Reading or viewing a poster is different from reading an essay or academic paper. The viewer is usually standing, in a busy room with many distractions and wants to be able to get some “bite-sized” stories to take away. As a rough guide 300 words would seem to about the right amount of text on a poster.

The posters should be readable at a reasonable distance. It should be a summary of questions, issues, methodology. The information should ‘hit’ the reader almost immediately; people should not be spending 10 minutes trying to discover the important points.

In your posteryou will want to cover (though this is a suggestion, not a formal requirement) the following:

  • an abstract
  • any relevant project background that motivates the research
  • overall aims and objectives
  • key literature
  • research design or methodology(ies) adopted (how have you undertaken the research?)
  • your findings and conclusions

Software advice

You will find it easiest to use PowerPoint to prepare this poster but of course can use other software if you prefer. To be on the safe side, save it in pdf format before submitting.

Size and Orientation of the poster

The required size and orientation of the poster is A1 size and portrait orientation. To do this in Powerpoint, follow these instructions:

  • You need to set up a new document in PowerPoint. Then go to
  • File, Page Setup or Design, Page Setup (depending on which version of PowerPoint you have)
  • For the size of paper you need 'custom' then type in 59.4cm width, 84cm height –and you must choose portrait orientation.

Some Tips

  • Think about the main story you want to convey. Your research probably has many elements to it – not all of which need to be explained for the reader to get the bigger picture. Try to think of the main “take-away” you want readers to get – is it something about an innovation in your methods, or new evidence on an important policy question, a better defined hypothesis test?
  • Map out your poster first by hand – what are the text boxes, images, graphs, diagrams, maps etc you want to include?
  • Think carefully about your colour choices: too simple a palette might mean your poster doesn’t stand out, but too much colour, or clashing colours, might be hard on the eyes.
  • Make text large enough to be readable at a distance. Print out your poster in draft form as A4 size, if you can read it comfortably at arm’s length then your font size is probably large enough. If in doubt, go bigger!
  • Choose a font style and colour that is easy to read and stands out against the background. White text on a very dark background can be very effective but of your background varies a lot in shade then white text might not be very legible.
  • Choose standard fonts that are available on Sussex pcs – Arial, Times Roman etc – to avoid problems when moving between pcs and when printing.
  • Group elements of your poster into text boxes so the reader can zone in on specific aspects or locate and re-read elements again. For example, put the text about research design or methodology in one box and label it.
  • Use a mix of diagrams, pictures and other images with the text to ensure your poster has visual appeal, grab and keeps the reader’s attention and interest.
  • Use headings that convey useful information – e.g. instead of “graph of poverty and corruption” use some words that help the reader take away a message “countries with more corruption tend to be poorer”.
  • Does your poster need a background image or would that be distracting?
  • Test your poster on each other and on a critical friend.
  • Make sure your name is displayed clearly on the poster.

Useful resources

A really useful online tutorial from Leicester university will help you think about layout and visual flow, colour choices, amount of text, pitfalls on choice of image. I would highly recommend working through this before you go too far in designing your own poster. It will take about 20 mins and is time well spent.

The poster event

The actual posters will be displayed in an event on 4thOctober – venue to be advised by the Doctoral school. Printing is done by the doctoral school. Prizes are awarded for the best poster(s).

Dr Julie Litchfield

August 2016