Reading time: 5 min

To design a clear and visually appealing informative medical poster, you're going to need a handful of things.

I once attended a healthcare communication course with over 400 other healthcare students. In this course, I designed a top scoring and well-reviewed medical poster explaining a complicated medical concept for a layperson audience.

Designing posters can be intimidating. Translating complex information into something anyone can understand is not always easy.

Fellow students have previously asked me how I design killer posters.

Here, I want to share my top tips to help improve your poster design and communication:

Keep It Clear

1. Be Clear and Succinct:

Avoid all jargon.

Don't assume your target audience knows what you mean.

Trial your wording- if you're targeting the general public, see if a middle schooler and your grandparents can easily understand your poster.

This will improve readability.

Make it Readable

2. Avoid Sentences:

No walls of text, please.

Begin wall of text. Please skip if you just want the poster tips.
Imagine if I designed my post such that everything reads like this. The entire post is just a massive block of text with no spacing. And I had no regard for readability. And I didn't summarise at the top of the article like I've been doing recently. Thank you for reading. I'm surprised anyone reads my stuff. It's fascinating to see reactions hit my inbox. ... Recently, I've had another run-in with having to create presentation slides with a couple of other individuals. Each of them gave me a wall of text to work with. And ultra-complicated jargon wording that a layperson cannot understand, when the target audience is a layperson audience. Those are not presentation slides. We are not writing a report or essay, and then rotating them 90 degrees onto a horizontal slides, and then calling it a day. Presentation slides should just cover the main points, and be a support tool for your presentation. You are the presenter, not the slides themselves. The walls of text, or endless bullet points, can often be shortened significantly or turned into a graphic of sorts. Whether a flow chart, separate lists, etc. Anything shorter, summarised, and more visually appealing. And far easier for an audience to follow.
End of wall of text.

This is unreadable. Right?

Minimise words and convert everything into flow charts or visual bullet points. This enhances clarity and skimmability. No one wants to look at posters that are walls of text.

Use brackets and skip unnecessary words to shorten information.

Example:

"Cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States.

Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year.1 Cigarette smoking cost the United States more than $600 billion in 2018, including more than $240 billion in healthcare spending and nearly $372 billion in lost productivity.1,2,3,4"
From: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/resources/data/cigarette-smoking-in-united-states.html

Turned into:

Cigarette smoking:
Leading cause of preventative death (480,000 yearly)
Costs: Over $600 billion ($240 billion healthcare, $375 billion lost productivity) (2018)

Effectively the same information with far less words.

And much better readability.

3. Add Numbering And Spacing:

Number sections according to the intended reading flow.

Make it easy for readers to understand which part of the poster to read first, and which part is next.

Add more space between sections that should not be read together. Blank space does not always have to be filled. This will enhance reading flow and clarity.

4. Choose Clear Font

You want clarity, not pure visual appeal in an informative poster.

Choose a common font (typically sans serif for posters).

Make sure it's large enough to be viewed from a distance.

Standardise the font sizes between titles, subtitles, and body text to keep the poster tidy.

5. Use The Colour Wheel:

Use complementary (opposite colours), analogous (similar colours), and monochromatic colours (different shades) to get a pleasing colour scheme.

Choose only 2-3 main colours with these in mind.

Too many colours is overwhelming.

Avoid the sharpest "highlighter" colours- your eyes will hurt.

Avoid putting light text on light backgrounds (unreadable), or dark text on dark backgrounds (also unreadable).

Design With Intention and Consistency

6. Add Images With Intention:

Don't add an image for the sake of adding an image.

Make sure the image correlates with the text and helps explain your points.

7. Keep a Consistent Design Language

If you chose to use a realistic photo in one section, don't then add a cartoon or vector image in another section.

Keep sections consistent.

Bonus tips:

These give your poster a modern and polished feel:

• Use flat, vector images, and round the corners of boxes.
• Freepik.com and unDraw.co are great resources for vector images.
• On unDraw, you can change the colour of the images before downloading them to match the colour theme of your poster.

The number of times I see fellow team members, whether at school or at work, destroying presentation slides and posters... it hurts.

I hope this post at least makes just a tiny difference.

Notes & Thoughts:

• Dug out this old draft from 2022. Updated for 2025.