Poster creation guide and other resources
There exist a variety of guides to designing academic posters.
This resource provides a brief summary as well as links, below, to more descriptive resources.
Summary of best practices
Planning & preparation
- Tailor a story for your audience
- Consider any requirements or standards (e.g., size, colour or B&W)
Layout & content
- Create the content and narrative before working on the poster design
- Write all text, get the high resolution images, figures (in vector format) & spell check your text!
- Having less can be more effective: be brief and clear
- Determine the size of the poster
- This impacts the amount of information that will fit
- Which images may be suitable (sufficient resolution)
- Provide a clear flow / organization, with breathing space
- White space:
- Helps to show narrative structure and provide emphasis
- You may need blank space along edges for printing
Colour Scheme & Fonts
- Select a consistent set of fonts and colours
- Limit font types (2 max), and sizes, with a minimum font size of 22-24pt
- Serif fonts are easier to read for the body, sans-serif for the title or headings
- To ease reading: Left justify, avoid long lines of text
- Keep contrast
- Use faded underlays when placing text above images
Images & graphics
- Keep figures in vector format when possible (e.g., SVG, PDF)
- Text in figures needs to be large
- Images need to be high resolution to not be pixelated
- When exporting to PDF:
- convert text to shapes
- set DPI of images if necessary
Printing
- Print at 100% size on correct paper size
Iterate through feedback
- Try printing a small version to evaluate (in A4 or A3 rather than full size)
- annotate changes and suggestions directly to page
- Share your test print or PDF with colleagues and family for feedback
(Re)Sources
License
