Storm surges in an idealized tidal channel: A power criterion for the unsteady bed shear stress
Creators: name: Roos, Pieter C.
name: Lipari, Giordano
name: Pitzalis, Chris
name: Reef, Koen R.G.
name: Campmans, Gerhardus H.P.
name: Hulscher, Suzanne J.M.H.
Publisher: name: NCK Netherlands Centre for Coastal Research
Year: 2022
Subjects: storm surges
channel model
bottom friction
linearization
frequency domain
shallow flows
scientific poster design

description: 1. Research content

This poster presents selected findings from the article Unsteady linearisation of bed shear stress for idealised storm surge modelling of 2021 for the participants in the NCK Days 2022, the yearly get-together of the Netherlands Centre for Coastal Research. This poster is open-access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. The summary underlying the poster is available from the event's Book of Abstracts both as web page and as PDF document (p.91).

2. Document design: how this poster is born

2.1 Structure and styling

The conference organisers required the production of a paper-based poster in A0 format with portrait orientation. The document has been designed in A4 format, as available from the copy shared in this website. A resolution of 1200 dpi produced sharp enough images when printing a document in PDF format in A0 size.

The whole document has been composed as a three-column table of a Google Doc document, using row-wise column merges to produce a well-marked layout consisting of stacked rows. In order to favour speed-reading, two font types and sizes contrast headings and narrative. Likewise, the text blocks are made of short and clearly spaced paragraphs, easy to point to and scan. The font size in the text body was readable when printed in A0 and, in retrospect for the specific venue the poster has been presented in, could still have been reduced to the same effect. Finally, test prints confirmed that an additional margin would have been present around the page.

The poster promotes a study published in a journal article, whereby the methods and results on display are already established. The audience is assumed to have been attracted by the poster title, thus to have been moved by an affinity for the topical area and to nurse a potential curiosity about reading the article in depth. As a result, the slant of this poster is intendedly descriptive, if not unimaginative; visuals are not especially meant or positioned to catch the eye.

2.2 Narrative and presentation

The findings of the article selected for the poster are those encapsulating the novelties most compactly. This content selection provides maximum integration between narrative and scientific advances, given the limited space of the document and of the interactions in a poster session. The table cells organise information progressively more detailed in the reading direction, broadly following a general-to-specific or abstraction-to-implementation order.

During a poster session, the poster presenter could illustrate the content either in a bottom-up fashion starting from the results, supported by cartoons and graphs; or top-down, starting from the generalities presented as textual narrative.

Outside the poster session, interested passers-by may find essential guidance into the topic scanning the poster in normal reading direction.

2.3 On-line dissemination

Hyperlinks to further resources, aimed at the digital poster version, are in blue. The DOI of this document has been reserved upon creating an unpublished Zenodo entry while drafting the poster. The DOI is shown in the poster so as to inform the viewers of the possibility to download the document after the conference. The poster has been uploaded ahead of the event and embargoed until the planned day of the off-line presentation. The publication date is the date of the poster session.

Description authored by Giordano Lipari