HOWTO
At some point you're going to have to create a poster of your research.
- Read the BELS Poster Guide. The guide tells you what they currently support, and any changes to the printing guidelines. You're going to want have BELS print your poster. The main reason is because it's free, but you have to give submit the poster a week in advance. If you don't submit it early, then you'll have to go to Kinko's on Pacific (next to Saturn) and pay $100, and you don't want to do that. Kinko's will print it up the night before, if you tell them to do it, though. (Not that I know anything about that. I'm quite sure I don't. I merely overheard some lazy grad students talking about it once.)
- USE REAL LAYOUT SOFTWARE! I can't stress this enough. You're doing graphic design, use the right tool for the job. In other words, DO NOT USE POWERPOINT! PowerPoint? is for laying out slides, not posters. Alignment, text layout, fills and shades, everything is just much harder to do in PowerPoint? (or any other presentation software) than in a real graphic design package. Personally, I use OmniGraffle. Inkscape, and Scribus are freely available cross platform layout software that is more than adequate for most purposes. Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard, but it has a fairly high learning curve, and of course it costs in excess of a grand.
- Use highest resolution images possible, and then shrink the image your layout software to size. Do not shrink the image in some graphic editing software and then use that. You will be reducing the resolution. Don't use anything with a printing resolution less than 300 dpi. If you use too small of an image, it will come out so heavily pixelated, it will look like it's in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Seriously, this is an all too common mistake. If you have pixelated images, it looks like you don't even care enough about your research to take the time to do halfway decent job. If you do care about your work, then find a high resolution image. If you don't care, lie.
- Use vector graphics if possible. The advantage to vector graphics, is that they're resolution agonistic. Since the image is defined purely by equations, the vector graphic will look it's best no matter what the size. Whether it's 8 x 10, a micron square, or as a 3,474 km across. Vector graphics, such as EPS figs and PDFs, are required when creating conference papers. This means that if you've already submitted this work, or plan to, you probably already have them laying around. Just reuse them, and avoid any pixelization issues.
- Layout for 48 inches x 36 inches. That's the size of BELS's printer. BELS will print edge to edge (i.e. "bleed"), so you're in charge of your own margins. Personally, I use one inch.
- Make it big. People are going to be reading your poster anywhere from two to six feet away. Size the text and images appropriately. You've got 12 sq feet, so use it. It's not an eye test, but it's not a billboard either. 24 pt to 36 pt text is perfectly reasonable for body text. If in doubt, err on the large side.
- It's a poster, not a paper! One of the common problems with science posters is that people try to squeeze as much text on to the poster as possible. While significant amounts of text are inevitable, try to limit it to just the main points. Someone should be able to get the gist of research in five or ten seconds, and then have basic understanding of it in a minute or two. That's all you have to shoot for. Don't explain your dataset in excruciating detail. Don't list all thousand steps you took in your methodology. Don't show all 15 results. Not everything is going to be able to fit on the poster, so don't try. Just show enough to give the viewer a taste. You're going to be standing next to it. You can fill in all the blanks if the viewer asks.
- Learn basic graphic design. Unlike some other universities, SOE does not have a standard poster template. This means that you're going to have do all the layout yourself. Graphic design is in some ways harder than writing a paper. It's something that looks deceptively easy, but as spending two second on MySpace? will show you, it's all too easy to get so very very wrong. It would behoove you to learn the very basics.
- Check your logos. While it may make your poster look like it's trying out for NASCAR, those logos are important. They tell people what lab is responsible for the work, along with who funded it. Frequently, logo inclusion is a requirement of a grant. You should have as a minimum logos for Baskin Engineering and the IRKM lab. Additionally you may need the logo for whatever funding agency is applicable. High resolution versions of these, and some other common ones, are attached. Use these logos together. Use them in peace.
- Submit a PDF. When you submit your poster for printing, you want to make sure that it looks as close as possible to what's on your screen. That's exactly what PDF was designed for, so use it. Some people suggest submitting an editable copy, but don't. First, you don't know what kind of software the other person has, so that may be problematic. (You're using real layout software aren't you? You better. It was point #2.) Second, the other person might not have all the fonts (especially when it comes to mathematical symbols) and images that you're using. If they don't, then the software will replace all the missing resources with whatever it wants, and your poster will turn out weird at best, and embarrassingly illegible at worse. Don't assume that the printer will notice, because he/she doesn't know what your poster was supposed to look like in the first place. Third, if you give the printer an editable copy, it's possible, however unlikely, that the printer will accidently change it for the worse, and you don't want that. So eliminate all these potential problems with a PDF, it's the read only least common denominator!
External Links
-- Main.Jonathan - 22 Apr 2009
ucsc_logos.zip