Poster Guidelines

A poster representation of your project is part of your project grade for INFO 490. A poster should describe one or more interesting aspects of your project. That is, a poster might not completely cover every detail of your project. Just like your in-process presentations and final report, your poster should tell a clear story. A good poster will be useful in two ways. First, a good poster will serve as a ‘conversational prop’ to help you describe your work and answer questions during a poster presentation session. Second, a good poster will also be capable of describing your project clearly when you are not there to present it.

Important things to remember when creating a poster:

  • Decide on your main message and let everything focus around that.
  • Use a large font; text must be readable from a distance.
  • Avoid clutter in your poster design.
  • Acknowledge people/participants/client for help you received.
  • The finished size of the poster will be 40” x 32”

Text

  • You must include title, authors, and affiliations.
  • Have a clear problem statement that any reader will understand.
  • Section titles and headlines with larger font size or different font face.
  • Key information and terms in the text body should rely on font style (e.g. italics or bold).
  • Less is more. You can include other elements than the above mentioned, but minimize.
  • Use bullets or other pointers instead of numbers for lists.
  • Connect the text and figures with a reference (e.g. “… see Figure 3, to the left.”).
  • Spelling and grammar count.

Graphics

  • Use graphics!
  • Make the graphics large enough so that people can read them from a distance. Remember that if you use a screen snapshot of a user interface, the graphic has to be large enough so that the important features/details are clearly visible.
  • Use color if applicable or representative of interface. Remember that not all colors work equally well together.
  • Name and number your graphics (e.g. “Figure 3 – Prototype alert dialog”)

Layout

  • Does all the information support your main message and tell a story?
  • Is there a logical, visual flow of the poster?
  • Long lines of text are harder to read.
  • White space can sometimes be used as a visual frame for text or graphics.
  • Make use of white space to give the reader pauses.

Poster Production Strategy

Many groups have had success creating their posters in PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator because of the ability to manipulate vector graphics. This enables the arbitrary scaling of graphics and text. Groups have had less success with Photoshop, Publisher, and Visio. You should design your poster for the finished size (40x32) and then scale it to fit Tabloid (11x17) when you need to print proofs for your TA or when submitting. Lastly, electronic submission of your poster should be in PDF format set to print on a page size of 40x32. You might find it easier to print your poster to a file (a PostScript PRN file in windows) and then use Distiller to create the final PDF.

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Many design capstone projects address a new problem or a known problem from an interesting perspective. As such, design capstone projects are appropriate examples of undergraduate research. Selection of posters for the Undergraduate Research Symposium is competitive. So participation in the symposium reflects a significant achievement by you and your project team.

The poster you create should be suitable for inclusion in the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium which will happen in May. You are not required to submit your poster to the Undergraduate Research Symposium, but it is highly encouraged. Your application for the Research Symposium requires a 300 word abstract which is part of your written project report. Given that you’ll already have the 300 word abstract and a poster ready for submission …

If you submit your poster to the Undergraduate Research Symposium, please let David and Mariko know. We will coordinate efforts with you so that your finished poster is printed and ready prior to the symposium poster event.

Additional Information

Undergraduate Research Symposium website: http://www.washington.edu/research/urp/symp/index.html

“Basics of poster design” from the Washington Space NASA Grant Consortium: http://www.waspacegrant.org/posterdesign.html

Check it out for more detail and examples of illustrated posters and links to other resources.