designing your poster

Posters for scientific meetings are made in a number of ways, typically either from small bits and pieces that are printed separately and glued onto a backing to create panels or from larger printed sheets that include text and embedded images. While we make many 40" by 40" posters, they are printed downtown and cost $150 or more. More often we use an Epson 3000 printer to print posters that are composed of four or six panels, each of which measures 16.5" by 23.4" (42 cm by 59.4 cm).

Begin the design of your poster with a small sketch that shows the whole thing with the title block, major headings, running body text and your pictures and figures. Several iterations of thumbnail sketches will help you understand what should go where and how much space will be needed for each part.

The individual panels can be vertical but are far more often horizontal. Before you begin to assemble your poster set the page size in your software. Most computers will not list A2 as a paper size, so go to Page Setup, select custom size and specify 16" by 22.65" (40.6 cm by 57.5 cm) as the size. You should also leave margins of at least a quarter of an inch on three sides of the image area and a margin of half an inch on the bottom of your poster. Most of our posters are made in Microsoft PowerPoint, but they could also be made in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign or Corel Draw. PowerPoint has serious limitations for page design and does not allow precise placement of the parts of posters, but it is what most people use.

The overall design of your poster should be eye catching, easy to follow and visually appealing. People don't want to stand there reading all of Tolstoy's War and Peace so try to limit the amount of text in your poster and instead use figures where appropriate. The ratio of the golden section is used by many designers to create harmony in the relationship of the parts to each other and of the parts to the whole. The figure to the right by the great French architect le Corbusier shows how the human body reflects the proportions of the golden section. The ratio of 1 to 1.618 repeats a number of times both in the ratio of the parts of the body to the whole and the ratios of parts of the body to each other. These proportions can be found throughout nature and are used by many designers, painters and architects. Try to create balance and harmony in your poster by keeping this proportion in mind.

Type can be set flush left, flush right, centered and justified, but blocks of sold text are usually more readible when justified. Type can be set in a sans serif face (Arial, Swiss or Helvetica) or a serif face (Times Roman, Garamond) and can be bolded, italicised or italicised bold. Below are examples of serif and sans serif type. The serrifs are the small cross pieces that terminate the shafts of the letters.

Well designed posters often use large bolded sans serif type (60-96 point) for the title, smaller bolded sans serif type 30-36 point) for section headings and a roman type (18 to 24 point) for the body text. Fancy faces should be avoided, since they are difficult to read and borders around blocks of text should similarly be avoided since they break up the flow of the whole. You do not have fill every bit of space. Some empty space will increase the ease of viewing.

To make you poster more readible, the colour of the type should clearly contrast with the background colour. In the following examples, notice how as contrast between text and background decreases the words become difficult and then impossible to read.

Below is an example of a horizontal four panel poster by Erica Fradinger, Sandra Krueckl and Nancy Sherwood. The title block is split in two across the top two panels. The top left panel has a flush right block of text and the top right panel has a flush left block that aligns with the text on the left sheet. There are coloured blocks under the the section headings in order that they stand out and reversed white body type set against a dark blue background. The figures were imported and in this case each consists of a number of individual images that have been assembled and lettered in Adobe Photoshop. When you import pictures, make sure that they are at least 400 dpi and don't change the proportions of the image.

Body text should never extend across the whole width of a panel of your poster. Instead, type should be broken into two or more columns to increase its readability. When possible, the panels should be designed with a grid in mind and all the elements, headings, body text and figures should be arranged on a grid. Your readers must be able to follow the flow of your text and images and the elements must line up from panel to panel. As mentioned above, make sure your text is easily readible by using light type on dark backgrounds or dark type on light backgrounds. Avoid colour schemes that require that viewers wear sunglasses.

In the poster above the white borders were cut off with a razor and when assembled into the final poster the panels were brought together giving it the appearance of one unified whole. The UVic logo should be included in your poster when possible, especially if it is to be used off campus. Below are two styles of the UVic logo. Click on either to bring up larger versions and then right click on the one you want in order to save it. Then use the Insert/Picture/From File comand and place it in your poster:

printing the poster

Please use your name as part of the poster file name. We see hundreds of files called "Grad Symposium" each year and have to open each to find to whom it belongs. If you are using any unusual fonts make sure a copy accompanies your file, otherwise font substitutions may occur with strange and embarrassing consequences.

If you are doing the printing yourself, feed one sheet of paper at a time, putting it glossy side down on top of a backing sheet. Go to the Print/Properties and select the Main tab. Specify the paper type as glossy photo quality paper and select quality rather than speed. On the Paper tab select the paper size as A2, select centered and set orientation to Portrait or Landscape as required. Close Print/Properties and on the Print tab select scale to fit paper. Then Print each page, one at a time.

The printer sometimes behaves badly and runs a sheet through without printing anything, in which case the paper should be carefully fed again and the printer should be unpaused or reset. Make sure that none of the ink out lights are lit. Please try to book time well in advance for when you want to print. Four panels will need as much as five hours, depending on your file size. You might want to have the finished panels laminated, otherwise they will fade and will be very susceptible to scratches and water damage.

For other ideas you might want to read Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint and John Woolsey's Combating Poster Fatigue (Trends in Neurosciences 12:9 p325-332). You might also look at our web page on Presentations.