POSTERUS PRESENTUS

While a page of posters may seem to be the same as a page of flyers, and you may be asking yourself “why is there a link for “posters” followed by a link to “flyers,” I can assure you that the two are, in fact, different.

Posters refer to poster presentations, the creative deliverable that follows the end of a hopefully fruitful research event ¹⁾. Research posters take a 50 page paper and condense it into neat bullets and talking points, making it possible for conference attendees to digest hundreds of research projects in a single weekend, rather than taking months and months to read all those boring papers ²⁾. These posters are often rolled up into cardboard tubes and gripped in the sweaty hands of graduate students to be hung and conversed about in the presence of said graduate student's peers and superiors.

Flyers refer to the printed paper community communication devices that are often stapled to telephone poles, tacked to Whole Food's cork boards, and plastered across social media. They advertise your boyfriend's second cousin's punk folk band ³⁾, your Methodist church's Home School Book Fair ⁴⁾, and that disgruntled looking husky/boxer mix that went missing last Thanksgiving ⁵⁾.

While my experience creating posters is limited (in reality, I've only done one by myself), they are devices that I find incredibly interesting and useful. I also find it rather relaxing to spend months researching a topic, composing a paper to go along with it, and then getting the chance to vent some creativity into a 20×27 piece of paper that will look all shiny and what-not while still conveying the research I spent those previous months compiling.