Ben's Homepage
University of Leeds

Making Your Poster

I personally prefer to use PowerPoint for making the poster (set up your paper size in Design > Page Setup). It has excellent handling of aligning items, an easy colour chooser and the font/design can be modified in just a few clicks. Other software options would be Corel Draw, Illustrator, or InDesign (the professional standard), but they're slightly more fiddly.

You poster should contain the following things:

  1. Your name
  2. Your email address (not required, but recommended if you're still looking for a job. Not your Leeds one!)
  3. The course you're on
  4. The year
  5. A title (which doesn't necessarily have to be the same as your thesis')
  6. Logos for your companies (make sure they're the current ones and NOT PIXELLATED, here's Leeds' (.SVG/Zipped Pack))

  7. An introduction (for those who may have missed your presentation)
  8. A map (scientists just love looking at maps)
  9. A nice big picture (to lure people over to your poster stand)
  10. A conclusion (so people can walk past and get the gist of your project)

Design

Layout

The actual layout of our poster is something you will probably be worrying about. Don't worry, it's very easy to move things around in modern software packages. The easiest thing to do is to extract a story from your thesis, be this the same one you're telling in your presentation or not. Split this story into a few key chapters and then lay them across your poster in numbered boxes in a logical manner.

The most important parts of your poster are the pictures, as they are what will draw people in. These need good annotations or text next to them, as you will probably find that nobody actually stands and reads the whole poster straight away. Make them good quality and eye-catching.

Colour

As I suggest for your presentation (here) you can create a colour palette for you poster that matches your company logos, or perhaps your largest images.

Font Size

Font Sizes Document - Print this out then stand 2 meters away. What is most readable?

Other Information

Test Printing

If you save your poster as PDF and then open it with Adobe Reader. In the Print settings you will see the option to print the poster onto multiple A4 sheets- this may be worthwhile to get a feel for the size and quality of your poster before the final print is done.