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HIST 4635 - Senior Seminar: Poster Guidelines

This guide provides library and web-based information appropriate for students enrolled in HIST 4635: Senior Seminar course.

What is a research poster?

Research posters are used to quickly, yet efficiently summarize your research project. Like research papers, research posters outline your project's background, methods, findings, results (typically in graphical form), discussion, references, and acknowledgments. You can consider your research poster to be a condensed version of your research paper. Always consider your audience when determining what to present and how to present. Research posters should be understandable to those with basic and advanced knowledge of your research topic.

What should be included?

While some things might be obvious about what should be included on your research poster (your name! a title!) use this checklist to think about other things that usually should be included on a humanities research poster that is intended to be presented to others.

  • Title for your poster (is a subtitle necessary to help explain concepts?)
  • Your name
  • Your Georgia Southern University affiliation
  • Your home institution's logo 
  • Photographs/Images/Infographics
  • Labels for photos/images/infographics, including photo credits
  • Citations 
  • Your research, of course! 

What else should I consider?

To increase the readability and appeal of your poster, adhere to the following best practices:

  • Use a mix of text and images to increase poster appeal and readability. Remember, viewers will need to understand your poster in a short amount of time.
  • Use assessible color standards -- for example, try to not use red and green together
  • Be sure that your background is darker than your text
  • If you are using an image as your background, be sure to adjust coloring settings to not distract from your poster's content.
  • Consider the space you will be presenting in. How wide of an audience can your poster capture?
  • Poster sections should be easily distinguishable. To help with this, make the section headings larger than the rest of the text. You may also want to give your headers a difference background color to help them stand out. 
  • Try not to exceed 100 words total.
  • Only use acronyms that are known to your audience.
  • Bullet points are preferable when appropriate.
  • Use a non-cursive script for your poster - like Times New Roman and Garamond
Subjects: History