How to Create a Compelling Poster Presentations for an Academic Conference

Alexa

— 4 min read
How to Create a Compelling Poster Presentations for an Academic Conference

Your case report was accepted (YAY!) but now... now you have to actually follow through and create a poster presentation.

Ooof. I feel you.

I'm by no means an authority on this subject, as I'm rather new to the academic world and entirely self-taught.

But here are some of the things I've learned: I'm sharing with the hopes that it helps YOU.

[If you're not sure how to start writing a case report, check out my blog post that addresses that, linked at the bottom of this article!]

Tips for Your Poster:

  1. Come up with a catchy title: a pun, a mystery, something unique. Think "A Case of the Missing Kidney" instead of "Renal Agenesis: A Case Study" as an example. Make the title big and easy to read.
  2. Go to the conference website and/or acceptance email and read their instructions thoroughly. More often than not it'll answer a ton of your questions. Here is the snippet from the AAEM conference I attended in 2025:
  1. Use more pictures than words: make it so that you can clearly read it from a few feet away. Avoid lots of blocks of text. Use diagrams, pictures, charts/tables. Your goal: visually appealing. Make it pop and have fun with it!
  2. Make sure you spell check x3 and do not misspell your name, your institution's name or your collaborators' names (awkward).

What I wish I knew:

First and foremost, your program MAY HAVE an in-house graphic designer whose job it is to help you with these posters. For my program, we had a lovely gentleman who not only sent a template in PowerPoint for me to use but also made adjustments and printed it, free of charge.

How to find this person?

  1. As your program director / GME head.
  2. Ask fellow residents who have presented before – that's how I figured out that we had this free service.

For my second set of posters, I used Canva (Pro, but the free version is likely sufficient). The important thing is to get the dimensions right, so be sure to refer to the email/website where they specify that: each conference has different dimensions.

For printing, if you don't have an in-house graphic designer, reach out to the conference. For the MEMC25 in Budapest, the conference was affiliated with a printshop and it was very streamlined: I sent in the file and then picked it up the week of the conference and paid on-site.

Helpful resources:

AAEM shared these resources in their acceptance email, so huge thank you to them for these and I hope they help you, too!

Here's a sample of one of my posters. This is definitely not an award winner, but if you needed an idea of what a poster could look like, here you go:

My case report on MIRM that I presented at a conference this summer. In retrospect, there's quite a bit of text but at least it's not blocks of text.

Let me know if you have other questions – happy to try to help. Here are some other blog posts that might be relevant to you:

How to Start Writing Case Reports
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Follow my journey as an ED attending and educator on Instagram at @a.youngdoctors.journey.

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