April 30th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
- Happy Customer!
Here’s a happy customer telling us how much she loves her poster!
This is Marisa Lara from the State of New Hampshire Dept of Public Health presenting a poster at the CDC Diabetes Conference in Kansas City. She went to the trouble to not only send us a picture, but to make a little sign! It was her first poster presentation, and she tells us that it went really well.
One of the best things about my job is that I regularly get compliments like this, almost one every day. I know because I read them at our Friday morning meeting to recognize the people who did the work.
How many people have a job where somebody calls or emails telling you how great your service or product is? It sure makes me feel good, and I think it’s one of the things that makes this a good place to work. Thank you, Marisa!
April 15th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
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.
February 17th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Orientation of your poster
It can be hard to know which way your poster should be oriented by the instructions you get from the conference. Graphic designers are pretty good about giving you the width of the poster first, so that a portrait oriented poster is given as 36×48, while a landscape poster is (correctly at least) given as 48×36.
The problem is that a lot of people aren’t really familiar with the convention. So they read that the conference wants a 36×48 poster, and they grab a template for a 48×36. The rule I use is that if somebody gives you dimensions of 48×36, they know about the convention, and if they give it as 36×48, who knows what orientation is intended!
Portrait oriented posters are very common in Europe, and we do see them used in the US from time to time. The best advice I can give you is to be really sure about the space you are being given, because it is truly terrible to arrive there with a poster that doesn’t fit on the board!
One other thing you can generally be sure of is that if the space given is 48×96 inches, it is probably really a landscape poster space. The conference won’t ask you to get on a stepladder to put it up!
January 28th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
- Type Contrast Examples
It’s funny how people who would never put yellow type against a white background seem to have no trouble putting black type against a dark background. We see black type against blue and green backgrounds a lot. In fairness, your computer screen will show more contrast than printing will, because your screen is lit from behind and just tends to show colors lighter than printing does.
We tend to change the type to white when we see this, or your poster will really be hard to read.
One thing that often happens is that the type is in a photo, where it needs to have contrast from both light and dark areas of the photo. My trick here is to put a drop shadow on the text, either white or yellow, so that you will have decent contrast whatever the background. I do that by duplicating the text with control+d, changing the color, and then nudging it into position with the arrow keys. It’s easier to do that if you turn off snap to grid, and if you zoom to 300 or 400%, you can nudge in very small increments to get it just right. The text on the bottom of the example shows how a drop shadow can add clarity to othewise hard-to-read text.
January 27th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Scientific Research Poster
If you are as busy as I am, the prospect of spending several hours getting your research poster designed is less than exciting. Here are some suggestions for saving time.
First of all, if you are at all adept at using PowerPoint, try downloading one of our poster templates. Copy and paste your text, photos, charts and graphs into it, shove it all around to fit, and you are done. Most people tell us it take them an hour or so. You’ll probably spend a good part of that hour communicating with a graphic designer anyway.
If you are not fluent with PowerPoint, we can do the graphic design for you. It usually takes us less than an hour at $75/hr. We’ll send you a proof to review, and print your poster when you approve the design. What you’ll need to do is send us the words and images that you want in your poster. We usually get a Word document and a bunch of jpg images.
What often happens is someone gets everything into the template, and it just doesn’t seem to be right. One thing you can do is to send us what you have, and we’ll have one of our graphic designers pretty it up for you. They have a lot of tricks that will help, including getting everything aligned and spaced. It probably takes them 15 minutes, and you’ll have a much nicer poster.
January 25th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Collaborating with different versions of PowerPoint can be a challenge. We have some thoughts about how to do that most easily, and are happy to share them.
First of all, begin with one person doing the layout of your poster. Try our poster templates as a starting point- most people tell us they can lay out a poster in an hour or two using the template. It works best if you resist the urge to use a lot of fonts- stay with Arial, Times New Roman, and Symbol. Everybody has them on their computer.
Once the poster is designed, send it around for comments. Make your changes, and now it’s time to show everybody what the poster will actually look like. We find it works best to send them a pdf, if you can make one (requires Adobe Acrobat-$250), or a jpg, if you can’t. You can make a jpg in PowerPoint by going to save-as, and dropping the file type down to jpg.
Saving a jpg in PowerPoint
What’s nice about doing this is that the file will look the same to everyone. It’s not editable, but they can always let you know if they see a typo or whatever.
If your poster is really large, the jpg will be too big for Microsoft Photo Editor to open by clicking on it. Just do insert>picture>from file and put it into PowerPoint and you’ll be able to view it.
January 20th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
You sent your colleague a PowerPoint file of a poster, and he tells you that all the paragraphs run over into the pictures. It’s a mess! What went wrong?
Usuaslly what’s happening is that you have used a font installed on your computer, but your colleague does not have that font on his. PowerPoint will substitute Times New Roman on his computer. The games begin. He can’t figure out why the poster looks different on his computer.
The problem is that every font has different spacing between the letters, and PowerPoint will reflow text to fit into the text boxes.
If we could get everyone to use Arial for titles, Times New Roman for paragraphs, and Symbol for all the greek letters, our lives would be much easier! Everybody has those fonts installed as part of the system installation.
An easy way to check that all the fonts are loaded on your machine is to do format>replace fonts and drop the replace box down. If you see a ? in front of a font, it was used in the document, but PowerPoint can’t find it on your computer. In 2007, it’s under Home>replace>replace fonts.
January 12th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Electronic Postersessions on the way?
I saw this billboard while I was getting a tank of gas in Pennsylvania over the holidays, and it started me thinking about the direction of change in our industry.
What keeps a researcher from plugging his or her laptop into a display screen at a poster session? How long before this becomes the way they are done?
Right now, display screens are really not portable enought to set up a poster session for a few days and then move to the next place. But it is probably coming! Somebody will invent a sheet of plastic you can plug into your laptop and use as a display. You’ll roll it up and take it back to the lab, and somebody else will use it the following week. You heard it here first. Anybody out there who thinks they know how to do it, talk to me!
January 7th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
We got a call yesterday from a man in India on his way to a conference in the states. He didn’t have time to print his poster in India, and wondered if he could order his poster online and have it shipped to his hotel in the States. You bet!
We actually do this kind of thing pretty frequently. It saves the hassle of travelling with something that looks like a bazooka as you go through security. It means you have one less carry-on piece, which can be a big help. And, it can just make your life easier with one less thing to bring with you.
The only issue is that the poster had better be right, since you won’t have the chance to see it before you get to the conference. That’s where our experience in doing thousands of research posters every year helps. We know what to look for. We have people who have the skill and experience to fix them for you. We know how to get your poster right, and it will get there and be ready to go.
That’s the promise you have from us, and we guarantee your satisfaction.
January 5th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
We have an intern here from Plymouth State for the month of January. When I explained to her what we did, she said “Oh, it’s awful if you are trying to do a PowerPoint presentation with several people using different versions and platforms.” Right on.
Here’s an example of what can happen. PowerPoint flows the text down a line, and it collides with the text box below it. We find this happens between different versions, and especially going from Mac to PC or vice versa.
The real question is how to deal with it. Our suggestion is to make one person responsible for the design of your poster, and have them pass pdf’ or jpg files to the others for review. The whole cross platform thing makes it a real mess to have everybody editing the poster.
PowerPoint text refows
You can make a jpg of your poster by doing file>save as, and then choosing jpg as the “save as type.” When the dialog box pops up, choose “current slide only.” Often, the jpg is too large to double click on it and view with Microsoft Photo Editor, so you can bring it into PowerPoint to view it.
When you get ready to order your poster, we will ask what version and platform you used. That should be what the last person used. Proof carefully! If we see something like this, we’ll fix it, but often what moves are things that are not obvious to us.
