I recently attended the
21st annual meeting of the
International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP). I was quite excited by this, because this was the first chance I had to present at a conference for a few years!
This conference was different than most others I had been to. I normally go to scientific conferences. This meeting is certainly adjacent to academics, but people at this meeting are not mainly professors and graduate students in universities. They are communication professionals in businesses.
The contributed poster session was relatively small: 72 posters in total. But this did mean that the organizers were able to do a few things with posters that I had not seen at larger conferences.
Here are a few things I noticed.
More gloss
Many medical writing companies employ graphic designers. (I even met a graphic designer at a roundtable!) So it was not surprising that conference posters on display looked like that had been done by someone with more experience than a science grad student.
The choice of colours was more coherent. There were more graphic elements, particularly icons.
Instead of pie charts, there were donut charts with summary percentages in the middle, and other less common variations.
Same problems
Despite what seemed to be the hand of graphic designers, many posters still needed editors. I still saw many posters that contained mostly columns of small text. (Don’t bother clicking to enlarge on the example below; it is blurry on purpose).
The example above show the big blocks of small text that are the enemy of conference poster design.
Speaking of bad habits shared by academics and medical writers...
Jargon resists attempts to kill it
Medical
communications professionals are rightly interested in making sure that
people of many different kinds of educations and backgrounds are able
to understand medical research. There were many posters about PLSs and
PLPSs.
That’s “plain language summaries” and “plain language publication summaries.”
A
suggestion I have for anyone writing a plain language summary? Don’t
call it a PLS or PLPS. Try not to use any new acronyms at all.
Promoting posters of note
I liked that some posters got spotlighted. This conference had no contributed oral presentations, as far as I could see; only posters. The program committee reviewed the abstracts and picked a few that they thought were worth more attention.
The authors of two posters were given the chance to present their works after a keynote, in a big ballroom.
The authors of two more posters were featured in a “Guided poster tour.” When there were several parallel tracks of programming on the first afternoon, one option was to go to the room where the main poster session was held. The poster presenters had a microphone and small portable speaker, and were able to talk to whoever came in to hear them.
It was much like a regular poster presentation, except that there were no other presenters in the room competing for attention, and so the room was much quieter. The speakers were able to address a larger audience, and just had to do it once for everyone who came by. There was no expectation that they would go over the material for a few people individually.
Poster scavenger hunt
Another clever way to promote people checking out posters was a “scavenger hunt” in the conference app. Clicking the link led to a survey with questions about posters. Some questions gave you a specific poster to check out, with a question about the content. Other questions gave you some data or information presented on a poster, and asked you to identify the poster number.
If posters aren’t together, the venue is too small
I did not like that posters were in at least three different locations. In a room with only posters, the vendor’s room, and scattered throughout the hallway.
I spent much time in the main poster session room where I was presenting, and almost overlooked some of the posters in the hallways.
Not related to posters, but a nice bit of design...
Clever badges
The front of the attendee badge is standard stuff. The back, however...
The back of the badge features a small program guide! I hadn’t seen this done before. Great way to use space that normally goes to waste.
The conference organizers did some quite innovative things with their contributed posters. Although this has the advantage of being a smaller meeting with a relatively small number of posters, I think several of these ideas could be used at meetings that are substantially bigger.
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