Design Your Poster
Finally, you're ready to design your poster!
Contents of this Section
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How to set up a PowerPoint file for poster design
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QuickTime Video (3 min 40 sec; 12.7 MB) |
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What sections to include and what to put in them
Now that you've identified the points you wish to cover, you need to collect the relevant information for your poster. Think about the best way to communicate that information to your reader. Different types of graphics communicate different types of information. A photograph, for example, may offer a good resemblance to the original but is limited to showing the external or surface view of an object. The message you wish to convey can be lost in the detail whereas a diagram could present a clearly labeled cross-section.
Meet with your research mentor early in the design process. Share your content map and discuss how you plan to communicate the ideas. Your mentor and other lab colleagues may have valuable poster design experience and may even have images they are willing to share!
Divide your information into main sections and decide what goes in each section. For example:
Title |
A title that describes your conclusion or question in non-technical terms will attract more viewers to your poster |
Introduction |
A statement that gives a quick overview of your poster. Include relevant background to provide a context for understanding the central question or theme of your poster. Define acronyms if you use them, and avoid lab jargon. |
Objectives, Aims, Goals, or Problem |
A concise statement of the goal, question, or problem. Include an hypothesis, if appropriate. |
Methods |
A brief description, diagram, or flow chart representing each key process or procedure used to test the hypothesis. |
Results |
Describe the data collected and the methods used to analyze the data. Photographs, tables, or graphs should be as large as possible, easily interpreted, and labeled with a caption or figure legend. |
Conclusions |
Provide a summary, discuss significance of results, and key conclusions. Do the results support or not support the hypothesis? |
References |
Cite key publications in the text of your poster and list the references here. Include sources of any images or other materials used in the poster. |
Acknowledgements |
Thank the individuals, programs, and funding sources that contributed to the research. |
Finally, organize the sections of your poster so that the information flows logically. Plan to use bold section headings and arrange the poster so that the order of what to read is clear. Sketch out a rough layout of your plan indicating the placement of graphics and text. This will help you organize your space and see whether you might need additional graphics or text.
Design Tip |
To make your message stand out and save space at the same time, experiment with using a conclusion or statement in place of the traditional section heading. For example, you might replace the heading "Results" with a heading that states the take-home message such as, "Transcription of XYZ is Light-Induced."
Accept the fact that a poster cannot present as much detail as a journal article can. |
Use background and color effectively
Colors and backgrounds should be subtle. Color should highlight, separate, define and associate information. If it begins to compete with your information for attention, then it is too strong. Color works best as a background element, such as a field against which text is set, rather than as a foreground element itself. Colored text is often harder to read than the same words in black. Just setting headings in color does not necessarily mean that they will be more noticeable than the text surrounding them. Small text set in color is hardest to read of all.
Be aware that colors look different on your screen than they will in print. In general, a color will appear lighter on the screen than in print. So, select a lighter color than you think you need for your background if you are using black text.
Design Tip |
Avoid: dark backgrounds, busy patterns as backgrounds, and using too many colors.
Some of your audience may be color blind so make sure contrasts are high between bars of graphs, lines on charts and backgrounds versus text. The most common form of color blindness affects red and green. |
Leave space
Space is the distance or area between or around things. White space provides a frame for your material and makes the other components stand out. Too much white space and your viewer's eye will wander. Too little and the result is confusion.
Space can be used to:
- Give the eye a visual rest.
- Create ties between elements
- Highlight an element.
- Put a lot of white space around something important to call attention to it.
- Make a layout easy to follow.
- Make type as legible as possible.
Design Tip |
White space (the absence of text and graphics) is vital to graphic design. The key is to add just enough white space so the eye knows where to go and can rest a bit when it gets there.
You can control white space in the following location: margins, paragraph spacing, spacing between lines of text, gutters (the space between columns), and surrounding text and graphics. |
Create legible text
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Choose Appropriate Fonts and Font Sizes
- Use common font types, such as Times New Roman or Arial. If you use an unusual font, or a non-postscript font, it can cause problems when your poster is converted to a.pdf format for printing.
- Use the following guidelines, to make your poster easy to read at a distance:
- Title
- Author
- Section Headings (Sub-titles)
- Main Text
- References & Acknowledgements
- 30 point font size will accommodate 250 words per square foot.
- TEXT AND TITLES WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITALS ARE HARDER TO READ
- for ease of reading, nothing beats black text on a light background.
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Design Tip |
Consider carefully whether to use paragraphs, lists, or graphical representations for the different sections. Paragraphs are more effective at revealing the logic of arguments. However, paragraphs on a poster are intimidating to read, especially when they are long. Use vertical lists rather than long paragraphs. For the list to be effective, limit the number of items (no more than four), and the length of any one item to just a few lines.
Avoid: extremely long titles; excessive use of different fonts |
Layout text and create image placeholders
Map out the sections of your poster using the PowerPoint file you created earlier. The example below uses gray-filled boxes as placeholders for graphics and text. This will help you organize your space and determine if you need additional illustrations or text.
Creating Text in PowerPoint
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Text can be typed directly into the poster or it can be pasted in from a word processing program.
1. Click the "Text Box" on the "Drawing Menu" (Fig. 1) or go to Menu: Insert > Text Box
2. Drag the mouse pointer across the slide to draw a box where you want the text box to be, and then release the mouse button.
3. Type or paste text (from the clipboard) to create the text that will appear in the text box.
4. Move or resize the text box as needed. (Fig. 2)
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Changing the Font, Size, and Text Attributes |
To change the font, select the text box by clicking anywhere in the text box, then again on the text boundary. Notice that the boundary changes from a hatched to a stippled appearance when the text box is selected. (Fig. 3)
You can also select just a portion of text within a text box, as you would in a word processing program. |
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The Font Formatting Palette (Fig. 4) contains menus for changing the Typeface (Arial), font size (32 points), color (black).
The row that begins with "B" allows you to change the attributes of the text, such as bold, italic, underlined, shadowed, superscript, or subscript. Additional attribute options are available in the Font dialog box using the menu Format > Font.
To quickly increase or decrease the selected text's font size, click the Increase Font or Decrease Font button. These look like large and small capital A's, respectively, and they bump the point size on selected text up or down by one place on the size list.
To align a paragraph to the left, center, or right of its text box, or to justify it within the text box, click one of the buttons under Alignment and Spacing - Horizontal. |
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Adjusting Line Spacing
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You might have noticed as you were typing text into a text box that when you press "return," you start a new paragraph. By default, PowerPoint leaves some extra space between paragraphs and single-spaces all paragraphs. You can change the spacing if you want. Here are some examples:
- Within a bullet list, you might want to eliminate the extra space between paragraphs so your bullet items appear closer together.
- If you want to make a large paragraph easier to read, yhou might add extra space between the lines.
- If you need more space between paragraphs, you can add it with the line spacing controls rather than using "return" to insert extra returns between paragraphs.
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- Select the pargraph(s) to format.
- Choose Format > Line Spacing. The Line Spacing dialog box appears (Fig. 5).
- To change the spacing between lines, change the number in the Line Spacing text box (The default is "1 lines").
- To change the spacing between paragraphs, change the number in the Before Paragraph or After Paragraph text boxes.
- Click OK to close the dialog box.
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Next Step: Working With Images
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