Research poster layout: what 40 templates have in common

Ask five researchers what belongs on a conference poster and you get five answers, all confident and most inherited. The guides disagree too: about columns, about how much text is too much, and about whether the format should be replaced by one enormous sentence.

So rather than argue, we counted.

How we counted

There are 40 A0 poster layouts in this product’s template library, 20 authored portrait at 1656 by 2340 pixels and 20 landscape at 2340 by 1656. Each one is a JSON file listing every block it contains, that block’s kind, its pixel position and its type sizes. A script read all 40 files on 30 August 2026 and counted block kinds, instances, positions and areas. Nothing was eyeballed.

Two caveats. These are one library’s layouts, not a survey of posters presented at conferences, so they reflect what a designer thought a research poster needs, and they were built to be filled by a generator, which biases them towards structure. Both make the counts more interesting rather than less, because a layout has to commit in a way that advice does not.

The blocks every layout has

Five blocks appear on all 40, without exception:

• A title, set as a text block. On all 40 it starts within the top 14% of the board, and the median title sits 1.4% of the way down, which is to say hard against the top edge.
• An author and affiliation block, with superscript markers linking names to institutions.
• A logo slot, exactly one, never two.
• Sections, each a heading plus a body: 178 across the 40 boards.
• At least one figure, a chart or an image with a numbered caption: 57 across the 40.

That is the irreducible poster. Title, who did it, where they did it, what they did, and one picture. Everything else in the library is optional, and the counts below show how optional.

The blocks most layouts have

Three more are near universal without being unanimous, and the exceptions are informative.

A methods protocol appears on 38 of 40. It is not a paragraph: it is a set of labelled entries, design, participants, intervention, comparator, outcome. The two layouts without one are the two that draw the method as a process chain instead, so in practice 40 out of 40 have somewhere to put the method, and 38 of them insist it be labelled rather than written as prose. That matches Colin Purrington’s long-standing advice to keep methods brutally compressed, and it is the single most useful structural decision in the whole set.

A QR code appears on 37 of 40, and 31 of the 38 codes sit in the top eleventh of the board, beside the title. Three layouts have none, and all three are the typographic, deliberately spare designs.

A list block appears on 37 of 40, usually for conclusions or key points.

References appear on only 34 of 40. Six layouts drop them entirely, and five of those six are landscape boards that spent the space on figures. If your department treats a reference list as mandatory, check the layout before you commit to it.

The blocks that define a layout type

Below the near-universal blocks, the counts fall off a cliff, and what is left tells you what kind of poster each layout is for.

Key numbers (a large value with a label and a detail line) appear on 27 of 40, with up to four on a single board. These are the layouts built around a headline result. The value is set at 69 to 84 points, the same scale as a title, which is what makes it the element you can read from across an aisle.

A participant flow diagram in the CONSORT style appears on exactly 10 layouts, all of them clinical or trial-shaped. If you are not reporting a randomised trial or a screening cascade, those ten are not your layouts. If you are, they are the only ten that will hold the numbers without you drawing boxes by hand. The CONSORT flow diagram explainer covers what belongs in one.

Tables appear on just 3 of 40, and process chains on 2. Both are deliberate specialisations: the table layouts are for comparisons and characteristic tables, the chain layouts for a procedure with sequential steps. The two process chain layouts are the only ones in the whole library that draw the method as a flow rather than describe it as text.

Portrait and landscape: what moves

The two orientations are not the same poster rotated.

Columns. Portrait boards run to one, two or three columns of sections, with two the most common (11 of 20). Landscape boards run to two, three or four, with three the most common (11 of 20) and five layouts going to four. Nothing in the library uses more than four.

Content density. Portrait layouts average 4.7 sections and 1.6 figures; landscape 4.2 sections and 1.2 figures. Landscape boards trade a section for width.

Figures. Figure blocks take 14.0% of a portrait board’s area on average and 10.0% of a landscape one. Sections take about 38% either way. The rest is title band, authors, references, white space and the header furniture.

Key numbers. 16 of the 20 landscape layouts carry one, against 11 of the 20 portrait. A wide board has a natural horizontal strip for a row of numbers; a tall one does not.

Titles. Portrait titles are set larger, a median of 62 canvas pixels against 46 for landscape, because a portrait board is narrower and the title has fewer characters per line to work with.

How many sections is normal

Four or five. Eighteen of the 40 layouts carry exactly five sections, twelve carry four, and only one goes to eight. Two-section layouts exist and are the billboard style, where a single finding dominates and everything else is a caption.

On words: the total character budget across all text on a board runs from 2,220 to 6,706 characters, with a median of 4,836. At about five and a half characters per word that is roughly 880 words for a median board, in a range of 400 to 1,200. That sits neatly between Purrington’s “aim for 1,000 words or less” and the NYU library guide’s 300 to 800. The layouts are not more generous than the advice; if anything they are at the tight end of it, because the character budgets are ceilings rather than targets.

What this means for your poster

Four decisions, in this order.

1. Take the orientation you are given. Ask the conference for the board size before anything else. If they say 36 by 48 inches rather than A0, the proportions differ enough to matter.
2. Decide whether you have one number or one picture. That single choice eliminates most of the library. A headline number points you at the 27 key-number layouts; a complex result points you at the figure-led ones.
3. Write four or five sections, not eight. Then write the methods as labelled entries, because 38 of 40 layouts assume you will.
4. Set the type before you fine-tune the layout. The sizes are not a matter of taste at this scale, and they are worked out element by element in research poster font size for A0. When the file is ready, the A0 poster checker will mark the trim, the margins and any type that has ended up too small.

One honest limitation worth knowing before you pick: seven of the 57 figure blocks are authored as image figures rather than chart figures, and those seven have no upload control and are skipped by image generation, so they cannot be filled. They sit on the mosaic, photo band and sidebar layouts. If your poster depends on placed photographs rather than charts, check the figure blocks in your chosen layout first.

The example

The clinical trial poster is built on one of the two densest layouts in the set: 23 blocks, eight sections, three figures, three key numbers, a labelled methods protocol and a CONSORT flow whose counts reconcile. It is the far end of what an A0 board holds, and it is worth looking at precisely because most posters should carry less than it does. The rest of the set is in the poster examples library.