A large portion of today has been spent trying to design my poster for the AGU conference. Note that I used the word ‘design’ rather than ‘create’. I’ve never done a poster before, so I had no idea how to even start such a thing, never mind fill it with content.
Luckily the corridor walls in my building are filled with old (sometimes as much as 10 years old) posters from other conferences. I walked around looking at designs, taking note of what I did and didn’t like.
Next I poked around the web looking for design tips. I really enjoyed the gallery at PhDposters.com which showcases some rather beautiful poster designs. Another good resource I found was the thorough (and highly amusing) essay on designing posters by Colin Purrington.
Finally I started actually trying to put my poster together. I had the poster dimensions right but no one had ever given me an idea of what appropriate font sizes might be. So I printed out a piece of paper with words: “This is 90-point, This is 72 point, This is 60 point” etc. (all in the appropriate sizes of course) and compared them to the posters in the hall. People used all sorts of different type sizes; I found 60-point too small for the poster title, though it’s perfect for contributor’s names. My title ended up in 86-point font.
Tomorrow I’ll actually start filling in content.
How timely! I’m just making my first poster as well. Thanks for the great links.
By: KC on October 16, 2012
at 2:00 pm