Poster preparations

Many of us are in the middle of preparing our posters for the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego (the Frohlich Lab is working on 16...). Here are my thoughts on how to prepare a poster that works:

• Less text. I do not care how little text you have on your poster, I strongly encourage to you reduce the amount even more. The idea of a poster (in my view) is to have the visuals to tell a story. Literally, tell a story. The presenter enters a dialogue with his/her audience! Text is so distracting, it is already hard enough to have a good conversation at such a huge meeting with tons of background noise and fatigue going around...
• More labels. You can never "overlabel" your figures. It is obvious to you that the y-axis is the amplitude of the raw EEG signal from electrode Cz and that the signal has units of microvolts. It will not be to most people coming to your poster!
• Make sure your figures look nice! Moving figures directly from Matlab to Powerpoint, for example, is not a good option. This will often involve some kind of hack. For us it is to save the figures as eps, open them in Adobe Illustrator and them save them as .png file. I am sure you have your own trick, please post below!
• Have the poster tell a "linear story". Sit down in a quiet room and tell yourself your own story (yes, speak out loud - when nobody is close...). You will find that the most natural flow is not the one you think you should choose when you organize your figures on your computer screen. Having a natural sequence of illustrations makes it so much easier to tell a compelling story.
• Prepare for a shortcut. Let's say it is 5 minutes before five and an exhausted but world famous researcher is coming to your poster, yes your poster! You want to be prepared to tell a shortened version and that should not involve jumping around between figures and columns of the poster like crazy. Rather, the poster should be organized such that you can say for example "In respect of your time, I am skipping the middle two columns here because they show all the control experiments we have done. Let me directly move to our conclusions."
• Inclusive acknowledgement. This is often the part people pay most attention to. Who is in your social group? Who are your friends? Can I trust you because somebody I know and respect has provided guidance? Make sure to include people, grants, institutions, and whatever/whoever else got you to where you are today. It also feels good to say thank you!
• Have I already said less text?? 

I wish you good luck preparing your poster for whatever meeting you are attending. Please comment below with your own favorite / least favorite advice for poster presentations!