Designing a poster
This is an introduction on how to make a poster. You can take a look at our Poster service pages or take a look at some examples as well.
In most cases a poster is used for presenting research studies, preliminary or completed, at a conference but it can as well be used for giving an overview of or ideas for research maybe in order to find appropriate collaborators or making contact with colleagues working in the same field, national or international.
Content:
The scientific poster
The content should be short and accurate written with a good flowing style. In order to keep the story short the point(s) could be narrowed down more than in a scientific paper and it is good to keep the point of the poster in mind avoiding unnecessary information etc. Most audiences don’t stay longer than 5 minutes at each poster so the message has to be short and clear.
The scientific poster contains some of the components of a scientific paper plus a header. An abstract for instance is not necessary as the form is already short.
The header
The header must make it clear where you are from e.g. having a LIFE logo. If the work is made in corporation with other faculties, universities you might include more than one logo. It could depend upon who the main author is. Read more about the header under Layout.
Title and author(s)
It is good to have catchy title making the audience stop to read your poster. The title should be easily read at the distance and is the first thing to catch the audience’s attention. Names of the authors are to be found just below the title with hyphened numbers or letter referring to list of departments, universities, companies etc. just below the name of the authors.
Introduction
The introduction should be short with no or very few citations. Reference to scientific papers should either be shortening down to those which are important to understand in which context the research has been made or be avoided. Remember to make it clear what the purpose of the research and/or the poster is.
Methods
The methods should give an impression of how you have done your research. However it is often seen that posters are done without describing of well-known methods (left for questioning at poster sessions) or they might be mentioned shortly in the introduction. Also a good illustration or picture of the experimental setup is an easy and catchy way to give impressions of the methods.
Results
Results are best given as tables, graphics or pictures with appropriate descriptions. Again it is important to be very concise in the formulation and only showing the important result which can lead to your conclusion. Remember to bring more result for the most interested at a poster session.
Discussion and conclusion
Here you discuss and make your conclusions. Some prefer to weave in the discussion at the results but often it is best to keep results and interpretation apart. The conclusion is the important part which all the rest of the content should lead to.
References
References are only important if you make a statement which is not commonly know or maybe to bring attention to your earlier works etc or the paper which is the foundation for the poster (if it is published).
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The layout could help to explain the message you want to enlighten. It should be easy to follow the flow of the poster so you might want to make some rough sketches first. The sketch provides therefore a good starting point for the poster.
The elements of a poster
Formats
At our download page you can find templates for PowerPoint preset to A0 or A1 formats, which are the formats that we normally print. The sizes are for A0 118,9 cm x 84,1 cm and for A1 84,1 cm x 59,4 cm.
If you want other formats than A0 or A1, you might expect an extra cost for printing your poster. Our photo paper comes in rolls 90 cm wide.
The reason for using PowerPoint is that most users are familiar with PowerPoint and the program is using vector graphics for fonts etc. (not bitmap).
Figur 1: The difference between vector graphics (left) and bitmap (right) when scaling from A4 to A0.
You can also use programs for graphics but you have to export the result as a PDF file and in this making sure to export in the right format. (Though we are able to print Illustrator (CS4) and CorelDraw (X4) files).
When you have downloaded a template the first thing you might do is to remove all text boxes to create you own design.
The header
The templates contain a header with the LIFE logo. The font is Times New Roman size 32/28. There are two types of templates either with name of the faculty or with the name of the apartment. Please remark the double space between characters. You can change the text in the Dias master. Go to 'View' -> 'Master' -> 'Dias master' and find the top page of the master.
The title
The size of the title should be about 90 - 120 points but will depend of how long the title is. The font type should not differ from the body font type. At least keep the same font family.
Body text
To keep a good readable text for about 1 meters distance the font size must be 22 - 26 points at least. A good readable font could be Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Calibri or Sans Serif but if you have long lines e.g. with only two columns, it is good to use a font with serifs or “feet” if you like, as the serifs makes it easier to distinguish between the lines. Fonts with serifs are e.g. Times New Roman, Times, Serif and Garamond.
Background
If you are using background colours be sure to keep a good contrast between the font colour and the background colour. Green on blue for instance is not a good choice. A dark colour for the text and a light colour for the background makes it easily read.
Don’t make the background too complicated as it might exceed the capacity of the photo printer ripping (decoding into printing format). E.g. colours changing from dark blue to light blue is OK but if the background consist of more colours fading into each other the printer might run out of memory when ripping the graphics.
Transparent boxes on a complicated background can also course lack of memory. Boxes with solid colours and no transparency used behind graphics etc. make the ripping easier. A bitmap background causes less trouble than complicated vector background except if the bitmap file (e.g. JPEG) is very large.
Graphics and pictures
Good graphics and pictures draw the attention of the audience. If your illustrations are made with vector graphics you have no worries but pictures are made by bitmap graphics and will become pixelated when magnified (see example above). Thus ALWAYS CHECK YOUR GRAPHICS AT FULL SIZE OF THE POSTER (zoom to 100%).
On the other hand it is good to avoid excessive “information” in the poster e.g. pictures with the size of 50 x 70 cm scaled down to 10 x 15 cm or pictures at 300 dpi resolution. Adjusting pictures to the right size for the poster and making the resolution 96 - 150 dpi will increase the performance of our photo printer. You can adjust pictures with freeware programs like IrfanView or Photo Toolkit.
Another way to avoid excess information is to use JPEG pictures as it is a compressed format while e.g. the TIFF format is not compressed or only slightly compressed. But be aware that if you edit and save a JPEG picture several times you will loose some information each time. Instead you can use the PNG format, which has all the advantages of JPEG (small file sizes) and can be edited again and again without loosing information. PNG can even handle transparent colours.
The file size
Before uploading the PowerPoint file please check the file size. If your file exceeds about 40 Mb you might consider to make the pictures and graphics more simple.
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When your poster is finished, fill in the form at our website and upload the poster. Be careful to fill in your email correctly as the system automatically alerts you when the poster has been printed. Students participating in ICT practice must fill in an invoice recipient (the teacher) and make note of the name of the course in the information box. Go to the poster ordering.
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ITLC, - siden er sidst opdateret d.14. maj 2012