Interactive posters and ePosters have been a growing trend in academia in recent years. And with more conferences switching to an online format, making your poster interactive is now even more useful.
It’s a great way to direct your viewer to interact with your work, beyond just reading your poster - after all, that’s the whole point of making a poster.
What’s more: it’s super easy.
Here’s an example. I have my poster finished and I now want to make it interactive.
I want to make it as easy as possible for people to find and follow me on Twitter, so the first thing I want to do is to make my twitter handle clickable, so that it takes people directly to my Twitter profile.
First, I need to highlight the text > right-click > “Link…”
Then, I simply type-in my URL - it’s as easy as that.
This could be a link to anything. Here are a few ideas:
Your video abstract
Your Twitter, LinkedIn, or ResearchGate profiles
Your lab’s website
Your dataset (e.g. Data Dryad, FigShare)
Download the poster electronically (put your poster on Dropbox or Google Drive and link to that)
The published paper
Supplementary material
Recruitment material or landing page
Questionnaire/survey
Your graphical abstract
Then, I need to export the poster as a PDF.
To do this, I click ‘File’ > ‘Export' and save it as a PDF.
Now, I can open my PDF and check to see that the link is working.
Where to upload your interactive poster
There are plenty of places to put your interactive poster. Here’s a few ideas:
Researchgate
Academia.edu
Your personal or lab’s website
Thinkshare
LinkedIn (the only social media to support PDFs)
Conference website or app
Make anything interactive
Interactivity is not just limited to text.
Repeat the same steps with photos, figures, icons and more!
Try making clickable buttons to make it even easier for your viewer to spot the interactive content.
There you go: an easy way to make your scientific poster an interactive PDF.
But, we’ve only just scratched the surface on what makes a great scientific poster.
To properly cover this topic, we’ve developed a whole online course: How to Design an Award-Winning Scientific Poster. You can learn at your own pace and arm yourself with the tools, templates, skills and knowledge to create your own award-winning scientific posters. We’ve had excellent feedback on the 33 video lessons, 3 hours of learning and 8 templates & downloads included - so we’re confident that you’ll love it too.
Take-away points
Make your poster interactive to make it easy (and more likely) for your readers to interact with your work.
Until next time!
Authors:
Dr Flynn Slattery
