Display using Repositionable Fabric

Sometimes you need to create a display to educate visitors about the research your department is doing. Here’s a great use of our new Repositionable Fabric material doing just that.  The Observatory was creating displays to educate visitors about weather and the work they do, and they wanted to cover some existing boards with new artwork. Our new repositionable fabric was the perfect choice!  All they had to do was peel off the backing paper and apply it over what they wanted to cover. As you can see from the picture, it looks great.

Portrait Oriented Poster

It’s the kind of thing to make you a little nervous. You send us your PowerPoint file, and we’re going to ship it to you in Europe. If it doesn’t arrive at your hotel, what are you going to do?

Well, first of all, we use Fedex, and they are awfully good at getting things there on time. Secondly, the people at your hotel will know how to contact Fedex should anything go wrong. We’ll email you the tracking number of your shipment, and with that information they can straighten out almost anything. We would also recommend that you leave an extra day for overseas shipping, just because things are a little less certain across that much distance.

Probably the best recommendation we can make is to buy a Foldable Fabric poster. You can put it in your carry-on, and have it with you the whole way!

One other tidbit for people heading overseas for a conference- posters in Europe tend to be portait oriented, while they are landscape oriented for most conferences in the US.  If you grab the last poster file you used and update it, it might be oriented the wrong way!

At the Poster Session

Since Microsoft is introducing the new PowerPoint 2010 today, I thought it might be helpful to talk about collaborating  to produce a poster.  We’ve been looking at the new tools being offered, and have some thoughts that we discuss in pretty good detail on our website.

Essentially, all the tools are set up for people in the same company using the same version of PowerPoint. Since most people collaborate with researchers from different institutions, they tend to have different versions of PowerPoint, and often a mix of Mac and PC platforms. Not to mention Windows 7, XP, and Vista. It’s not only different people- many of our customers have a different setup at home than they do at work.

When all those folks open a file, they are going to see different things because PowerPoint is not faithful version to version, and especially between the Mac and PC. It is awfully confusing to recommend changes to a poster when two people are seeing different things on their screen!

The discussion at Postersession.com will guide you through a process for being sure that everyone working on a poster sees the same thing.

Repositionable Fabric

People often have a problem putting up posters where they can’t put tacks in the wall, and don’t have the time or money for fixtures.  Here’s a great solution- repositionable fabric.  It has a “sticky note” adhesive on the back, and it sticks very well to most wall surfaces like painted drywall, wallpaper, wood, and formica.  About the only thing we haven’t been able to get it to stick to is a brick wall, which is just too uneven.

You can re-apply it many times. In our tests, we’ve taken a poster down and stuck it back up over 25 times. 

Wherever you have a need to have a temporary poster, and just want to stick it up, this is a great solution!

It also will serve very nicely as temporary wallpaper. People tell us they have had it up for about two years very successfully in a corporate lobby. Do know that the material is not waterproof, so it’s really for indoor applications only.

Our Shop

It’s the busy time for us, and I snapped this picture on Friday as almost every printer in the place was printing a poster.  That’s a lot of posters when you consider that we have 18 large format poster printers.

We promise that your poster will ship today if you get the file to us by noon.  The way we can do that is to have enough equipment to make good on the promise, and of course, the organization to get them out the door!

We can even have your file as late as 3:00 and still ship it, although we have a rush charge for things that get here after noon that must still ship that day.

While we don’t encourage it, we have shipped posters that got here as late as 4:30.  The company record is a file that got here at 5:05! Of course, that doesn’t give us much ability to react to problems with your file.

Still, we like to think that nobody can give you service as fast as we can during the busy season. Which is now!

Fabric Research Poster On Display

Lots of you ask “How does the foldable fabric look when I present my poster?”  Well, here’s a picture of one at an actual presentation, kindly sent to us by Susan Hardee of WakeMed Health and Hospitals in Raleigh, NC.

Susan took our template and tweaked it for her poster, which a lot of people do.  We post them for your convenience, and you are welcome to use your own template, or change ours to suit your needs. 

We are running a promotion over the next few days- send us a picture of you in front of your poster, and we’ll send you a free postersession.com golf shirt! We’ll post your picture on our website. Contact details are on the website.

Research Poster

You can download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free, which allows you to open and print PDF files. To generate PDF’s, however, you need Adobe Acrobat, which is a $300 (street) program.

PowerPoint 2007 has a built-in PDF maker, so if you have the latest version you can make a PDF without buying Acrobat. If you are making a PDF to send to a printer like us, make a “for print” PDF by doing “save as” and then choose PDF in the “save as type” drop down box.

Proof carefully! Acrobat has been known to do some funny things, especially with very large files.

The other problem with making a PDF is that it cannot be changed. That’s why most printers prefer that you give them a PDF- they cannot be blamed for any problems.  There’s only one difficulty with that- you might have a problem in the file, and since we cannot change the PDF we can’t fix it.  Believe it or not, we find it necessary to fix something in about 75% of the files people send us.

What’s special about our service is that we can accept the native PowerPoint file, and we have the experience to print successfully from it. We also have the ability to know what to look for and give you a better final product. We fix a lot of low resolution logos, type that runs off the page, etc. Where else can you send a problem file and have it come back right?

Self Standing Poster

Sometimes a conference will ask you to bring a free standing poster instead of giving you a board to mount it on. We can make a tri-fold poster, but what if you already have a poster, or are a graduate student on a budget?

What we are showing to the right is a regular 48×36 poster attached to a 48×36″ cardboard display that you can buy in most office supply stores for $10-12.  The carboard display folds to 24×36 for transport, and the poster can be rolled and put in a tube.

Generally you’ll want to have the poster laminated with plastic so it will sit smoothly on the cardboard display, although if you are on a buget a paper poster will work.

Binder clips on the four corners and in the top center complete the display. It takes a minute to set up, and gives a very nice presentation.