How much do you think a well-designed poster can be effective? Or how well do you think it will attract the attention of the reviewers? Do you think it is enough to choose a very new and applicable topic and try your best for researching it?
Writing an essay or abstract and designing a proper poster are needed for presenting your project in the best possible way. If this step is not done well, your work will not be noticed even if your work is great. In this post, we will provide you with helpful tips on designing a scientific poster.
Taste plays a key role in designing a poster. Although taste is intrinsic, seeing other good posters will also help. So try to see a lot of templates.
The first step is choosing the right software for designing your poster. The easiest and most affordable software is PowerPoint. In the PowerPoint software, click the design tab. Then click the Page Setup button and choose the poster size. Posters are usually designed as Portrait.
1. Poster Size
This criterion is based on the conventions and rules of various congresses which is usually 100*70 cm and 90*60 cm depending on the congress. So make sure to visit the congress site and find out the default size of the congress you want to attend before starting to design your poster.
2. Paper
The best paper for printing posters is coated paper because the ink looks better in these papers. They also absorb more color than regular papers. Besides, it is recommended to laminate your poster because otherwise it will be damaged in shipping. In addition, it makes your poster look more attractive and appealing to the reviewers. It is also said that matte laminate is better, but it depends on the environment where the poster is going to be installed. For example, if the poster is installed in an open environment, matte laminate is better since the regular laminate will reflect light.
3. Poster Logos
We usually put the logo of the congress on the right side and the logo of our own institution (or any other research center we work with) on the left. It is better to remove the background of the logos, and if you don’t have access to Photoshop, you can use the format menu in PowerPoint, to make the color of the background of the logo closer to the color of your poster.
In general, it is better to have a background photo (simple or patterned, just not too crowded). Posters without a background or with a white background will look like a newspaper). You can also select a photo related to the topic for your background (increase the transparency of the photo as much as possible). Add a number of boxes that should also have high transparency. You should also choose bright colors to highlight the text of the poster.
4. Writing Tips
Punctuation: Punctuation is divided into two categories.
- 1. Dot, semicolon, colon, comma … There should not be any space between these symbols and their previous words.
- 2. Brackets, parenthesis, quotations marks, … There must be a space between the first parentheses and the previous word. But there should be no space between the second parenthesis and the next word.
Fonts: The font size is usually between 48-50 for a 70*100 cm poster.