Finding purpose and your audience

Any poster should be eye-catching to grab the attention of the right people you are trying to communicate to. Let’s look at some simple, everyday posters (non-academic) to see how they’ve been designed to speak to their audience. Click on the yellow ! buttons for more information.

When creating an academic poster, it’s important to consider both the message you want to communicate and your audience. These two come hand in hand and you cannot start designing until you know what you want to say and who you want to say it to. 

It helps to first think about what your poster is being used for as this will give you a starting point for your audience too. For example: 

• Are you trying to incite a debate between specific parties or on a singular topic? Who would be interested in this debate and topic? 
• Are you trying to showcase the journey of a project and its outcome? What was the topic of your project and your academic field of study? 
• Are you creating a poster for sponsorship of your work? Who do you want sponsorship from and how can they sponsor you? 

Now you have an idea of what your poster is about, refine who it is for: 

• What type of person do you want to see your poster? E.g. age, gender, occupation etc. 
• What is it that appeals to this person? E.g. colour, shapes, imagery etc. 
• What do they want to know about and why? 

Asking yourself these basic questions, and you may think of some more, will help you to define what your poster is for and who it needs to speak to.