Research Poster Template

Academic research poster templates for conferences, symposia and poster sessions in any discipline. Choose a landscape or portrait layout, three or four columns, or a central-finding design, and fill in the sections with your own text, figures and references.

What is included

• Landscape three-column poster — the classic layout for 48 × 36 inch boards.
• Landscape four-column poster — for results-heavy posters with several figures.
• Portrait poster — for 36 × 48 inch portrait boards common at some conferences.
• Central-finding layout — a large central statement of the main result with supporting columns either side.
• Humanities / social science layout — more room for text, quotations and a research question panel.
• Section writing guide — what to put in each section and how many words.
• Poster session checklist and printing guide — sizes, file export and what to bring.

How to structure a research poster

A good rule is that the whole poster should contain no more than about 500–800 words. Visitors typically spend only a few minutes at each poster, so the title and main figure have to carry the message.

Common poster sizes

Always check the conference's instructions for maximum dimensions and orientation before designing. The Word templates are built at a smaller page size with the correct proportions, so you can scale the exported PDF up to the final print size without distortion.

Design tips

• Make the title readable from about 5 metres (roughly 85–100 pt or larger at full size).
• Use body text of at least about 24 pt at full size so it can be read from a couple of metres.
• Arrange content in columns that read top to bottom, left to right.
• Use high-resolution figures (300 dpi at the final size) and label axes clearly.
• Keep a consistent colour scheme, ideally your institution's, with strong contrast.
• Leave white space; crowded posters are skipped.

Printing and presenting

Export the final poster to PDF and check it at 100% zoom for blurry images. University print shops and online services print posters on paper or fabric; fabric posters fold into a suitcase. At the session, prepare a one-minute summary and a three-minute walk-through, bring pins or Velcro if not provided, and consider printing A4 handouts or a QR code linking to your paper or data.

Formats

All layouts are editable DOCX files with matching PDF previews. Section boxes are text boxes and tables you can resize. The writing guide and checklist are Word and PDF files. You can also recreate the layouts in PowerPoint or a design tool using the PDFs as a guide.

Adapting the poster for different disciplines

Laboratory and clinical research posters usually centre on figures, with methods condensed into a flow diagram. Social science posters often need a clear statement of the research question, a sampling summary and one or two key tables. Humanities posters may present an argument, key sources and short quotations, with images of primary materials. Engineering and computing posters benefit from a system diagram and a results table comparing approaches. The layouts in the pack can be adapted for each: merge boxes for large figures, or add a narrow side column for quotations and references.