Private College Scholars at the Capitol - Poster Guidelines
Overall dimensions of your poster may not exceed 30 inches by 40 inches. Size requirements must be adhered to in order to display 24 posters while keeping walkways open, as required by Capitol regulations. Easels will be provided. You will need to provide ALL other materials to set up your poster (clips, tape, pins, etc). Please note there will be NO electrical power for your display.
Each poster should have a header that is visible from a distance. The header should contain the title of the project, your name, the name of your faculty mentor and any collaborators, your academic department, and university.
In general, keep your display "visual," using graphics and photos. Keep text to a minimum. It is very unlikely that individuals attending the poster session will read a lengthy presentation.
We recommend having your poster printed on foam core. Alternatively, have your poster printed on to paper and then attach it to foam core with clips, tape, pins, etc. Because posters are displayed on easels you need a hard background on which to display your findings. Construction Tips (consult your faculty advisor):
- Plan your poster before you get started. You can use pieces of paper or post-it notes to play around with design layout.
- Use photographs, graphs, or other images. They give the eye a rest from text and entice the reader to visit your poster. (You really only have about ten seconds to make an initial impression, or the viewer moves on to another poster.)
- Do not simply post your research paper to the poster.
- Think in bullets rather than dense sentences or paragraphs.
- Make sure that you have a sharp contrast between the background color and the text color for readability purposes.
- Cut, cut, cut, cut; less is more.
- Left justify; do not full justify (like a newspaper column) as it’s hard to read.
- Make certain all spacing between headers and text is the same and that you have the same-size border on all sides (and that you have at least a ½-inch border).
- Limit yourself to 2 types of fonts and choose basic, not fancy, fonts. You might use one font on the title and the subject headings and another for text. Or you might choose to use the same font throughout. Arial is a good choice.
- Use fonts without the curlies (sans serif fonts); they’re easier to read.
- CAPITALIZATION IS HARD TO READ SO mostly AVOID.
- Underlining is hard to read; bold, bullet or change colors instead.
- You might put your headings in a different color than the text so as to make them stand out.
- Be thoughtful with your images. When printed, large graphics/pictures are not as clear as when small; pick high resolution graphics and photos. It’s best to pick the largest image and then shrink it to size as this improves resolution. Never increase the size of an image because when printed it becomes fuzzy. Also, if you can take a photo of the item, object, or person with a moderate-to-good-quality digital camera, the resolution will be far superior to anything you download from the web.
- Plan for lots of time—making a quality poster takes 3 times as long as you anticipate.
- Spell check and proofread and have 5 other people proofread too.
- Summarize. Simplify.
Helpful Web sites
- This is the jackpot of all web sites as it operates like an annotated bibliography (brief descriptions) of many of the top poster-making web sites; start here and you can find all the others: http://cte.umdnj.edu/career_development/career_posters.cfm
- Students typically find this U of M web site user-friendly and packed with useful advice: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~schne006/tutorials/poster_design/index.htm
- You might want to use several image search sites to help you locate appropriate graphic images or photographs or other illustrations for your poster presentations. You can use http://images.google.com/ to scan the Internet for images (graphic illustrations, photographs, computer drawings, etc.), which you can view online, print out, or save to your PC or disk. Just enter the topic, concept, or object for which you are seeking.
- AltaVista’s image site provides a more dynamic search capability and advanced search features for making more specific inquiries about the images you want to retrieve.
