Home / SFF / Design a Poster

Stage 7

Design a Poster

In the area of academic conferences, postering is for Graduate Students (Masters and Phd) and, depending on the conference, sometimes undergraduates.
When postering, students stand next to their posters for a given time slot (usually an hour) and people can approach and have a conversation with the student about their research.
Science Fair in Elementary Schools are meant to mimic Conference postering to prepare young minds for later academic research work.
There are a lot of websites that discuss how to create an academic poster.
Don't listen to them.
Instead, listen to those who are on the cutting edge of the moment to change posters.
- To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over
- What is the optimal design for a scientific poster? Insights from the founder of the #betterposter movement

Layout and design can take years of course work and practice to master.
Layout and Design is NEVER about what looks cool.
The overarching principle for a poster should be that every element (text, image and graphic) must have a REASON for its placement, orientation, color, and alignment.
You'll need an abstracted overarching concept to be the arbiter of all your creative decisions.
Above all, learn to let go. Just because you initially found a font type or image or layout enticing does NOT mean the poster should stay that way.
Intuition is never part of the process in layout and design.
- In Ann's Progression, below, she desperately wanted the phrase "Behavior is highly influenced by the perception of threat"
- It doesn't seem to work but she really really wants it; by the fourth draft, and the phrase just being clunky, it finally vanishes from the poster.
- She let it go.
- In the fifth draft she had an insight as to where it could properly go.

Making a good poster depends on tweaking every single aspect of the poster, down to the pixel movement of elements.
This is an animation of Ann's first draft transitioning to the final version.

Below, closely look at the intricate changes that transformed the first draft to the final draft

Choose images
- Duck Duck Go for images
- Luna Pics for Transparency and photo manipulation
Choose a color scheme from the images
- Once you select a color scheme, download the image it's on, place the image in your power point, and you can use the eyedropper to select the color.
Choose font types

Do not-- Do Not-- DO NOT ever use a template that power point provides.
DON'T!
EVER!
(not kidding, seriously just never)
Here's your template:
- In powerpoint, set your blank slide size to 48" wide and 36" high.
(If you have an older Power point program that will not enlarge to that size, use 36" x 27")