Poster Guidelines

A poster representation of your project is part of your project grade for INFO 490. A poster should describe one or more interesting aspects of your project. That is, a poster might not completely cover every detail of your project. Just like your in-process presentations and final report, your poster should tell a clear story. A good poster will be useful in two ways. First, a good poster will serve as a ‘conversational prop’ to help you describe your work and answer questions during a poster presentation session. Second, a good poster will also be capable of describing your project clearly when you are not there to present it.

Important things to remember when creating a poster:

  • Decide on your main message and let everything focus around that.
  • Use a large font; text must be readable from a distance.
  • Avoid clutter in your poster design.
  • Acknowledge people/participants/client for help you received.
  • The finished size of the poster will be 40” x 32”

Text

  • You must include title, authors, and affiliations.
  • Section titles and headlines with larger font size or different font face.
  • Have a clear problem statement that any reader will understand.
  • Differentiate key information or terms in the text body by font style (e.g. italics or bold).
  • Less is more. You can include other elements than the above mentioned, but minimize.
  • Use bullets or other pointers instead of numbers for lists.
  • Connect the body text and figures with a reference (e.g. “… see Figure 3, to the left.”).
  • Spelling and grammar count.

Graphics

  • Use graphics!
  • Make graphics large enough so that people can read them from a distance. Remember that if you use a screen snapshot of a user interface, the graphic has to be large enough so that the important features/details are clearly visible.
  • Use color if applicable or representative of interface. Remember that not all colors work equally well together.
  • Name and number your graphics (e.g. “Figure 3 – Prototype alert dialog”)

Layout

  • Does all the information support your main message and tell a story?
  • Is there a logical, visual flow of the poster?
  • Long lines of text are harder to read.
  • White space can sometimes be used as a visual frame for text or graphics.
  • Make use of white space to give the reader pauses.

Poster Production Strategy

Many groups have had success creating their posters in PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator and other vector graphics programs. This enables the arbitrary scaling of graphics and text. Groups have had less success with Photoshop and Publisher. You should design your poster for the finished size (40x32) and then scale it to fit Tabloid (11x17) when you need to print proofs for your TA or when submitting. Lastly, electronic submission of your poster should be in PDF format set to print on a page size of 40x32. Remember to “embed fonts” when generatin the output file because most commercial printers will not have all of the fonts your poster might require. You might find it easier to print your poster to a file (a PostScript PRN file in windows) and then use Distiller to create the final PDF.

Some Additional Pointers

"Basics of poster design" from the Washington Space NASA Grant Consortium: http://www.waspacegrant.org/posterdesign.html

"Poster Session Guide" from Colorado State http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/speaking/poster/index.cfm

"Creating Effective Poster Presentations :: An Effective Poster" http://www.ncsu.edu/project/posters/NewSite/

Undergraduate Research Symposium website has additional poster links: http://www.washington.edu/research/urp/symp/index.html