Poster Templates

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.

It has happened to almost everyone who has set up a Scientific Poster in PowerPoint. You get everything set up in a column, and it’s just a little bit too long.  You need those words, and you wish you could squeeze everything  just a bit.  Here are a few tricks that might help.

A very easy thing to change is the line spacing of your paragraph. By default, PowerPoint sets your text with 100% space between lines, and you can easily compress that space to 90%, sometimes more depending on the font.  This picture show Times New Roman with 100 and 90% line spacing, and as you can see both look OK.

PowerPoint Line Spacing

 In PowerPoint 97-2003, do format>line spacing.  In PowerPoint 2007, go the home tab, paragraph, hit the little expander ikon on the lower right, and the line spacing is at the bottom on the right.

One other favorite trick of mine is to find a one or two letter word by itself on a line. Make your column just a tad bit wider until the word jumps to the line above, giving you one more line.

We think text needs to be 24 point to be nice and legible on your poster. Reduce your type to 24 point if it is set up to be larger, as many of our poster templates use 28 point type. Failing all else, you can try setting your type size to be 23.5 and who will know? It might give you just the little space you need.

One of the tenets of graphic design is to leave a little room around your artwork.  If you take things right to the edge of your poster, like taking a paragraph right to the bottom of the page, things just look crowded.

We like to see about 1-1/2 to 2 inches of space around a poster. You’ll see that we do this on our poster templates, and it’s just good graphic design. If it means that you make your poster a little bigger, that’s what you ought to do. It will look better, and more professionally present your research.

We can make you a poster of any size, by the way. If you need just a little more room on a 36×48″ poster, you can make it 50″ long for a few bucks more. You don’t have to go to 56 or 60″. Oh, and the trick to adding just a few inches to the size:  select all, edit>cut, change the page size, then paste it all back. If you just change the page size, PowerPoint stretches everything.

People ask us all the time- should use gloss or matte laminate? Or, for that matter, should I laminate at all?

First of all, if you are using your poster for just a few hours we believe that a paper poster does the job very well.

If you plan to hang your poster in your lab afterwards, it’s a good idea to have it laminated. The laminate will protect it, and keep it looking fresh for a long time.

The question is then whether to use a gloss or matte laminated poster. If you worry about reflections or glare on your poster, matte is the way to go. Most people tell us that glare is not a problem in most poster sessions, so you can usually get away with a gloss laminated poster. The colors of your poster will be more brilliant on a gloss laminated poster too.

Here’s a side by side picture of gloss (on the left) and matte laminates showing how matte laminate will attenuate the glare.

There’s a feature of PowerPoint called the master page that’s pretty handy.  Here’s how it works:

Whatever you put on the master page lays below the normal view. It is locked in place unless you go to the master page by doing view>master>slide master in PowerPoint 97-2003, and view>slide master in 2007.

If you are doing a multi page presentation, the slide master allows you to put a common look for all your slides in just one place. If you need to change it, you change the master page instead of the background in 20 slides.

For a research poster, which is a single slide, the master page has a different use. It allows you to lock items that you don’t want to move around while you are arranging your slide. For instance, the columns and titles can be cut and pasted to the master page. Then, while you are putting in your charts and graphs, and moving your text boxes all around, you don’t have to worry about  the boxes moving too.

Especially if you are designing a series of posters, or are giving a template to a group of students and want all of their posters to have the same look, the master page is very useful.

It’s a simple thing.  Against white paper, black text is easiest to read.  Against a solid dark background, light colored text is harder to read. Anything in between, like blue text against a grey background, is going to be very hard to read.

Poster Template

I know, it’s not very creative to put black text on a white background. Your poster is supposed to grab attention, after all! It is also well studied that color attracts the eye much better than black and white. In fact, studies show that color ads in magazines are six times more memorable than black and white ads. So, you need color. But I would argue that your text is the wrong place for it.

You can have a colorful background, colorful charts and graphs, color pictures, and a colorful title block.  Just don’t make your poster hard to read! Here’s an example using one of our templates and some colorful pieces to make it eye catching.

When someone goes by your poster, they give the title about two seconds of their time. If it interests them, they’ll come by and read more, and hopefully talk to you.  It is therefore very important to make the title large enough, and with enough contrast to the background, to be easy to read.  The title should be at least 96 point type, which is 1″ tall. Text in the body of your paragraphs should be at least 24 point, or 1/4″ tall.

One of the handiest things in PowerPoint are the guide lines. You can turn them on and off using draw>Grid and Guides and checking the box that says “Display Drawing Guides on Screen.” In PowerPoint 2007, right click on the slide and select Grid and Guides. The guides will appear as dotted lines on your screen, but they don’t print.

If you move your cursor over the guide, then depress the left mouse button, you can move the guide. If you hold down the control key and move a guide, it adds another.

Objects and text boxes will “magnetically snap to the guides, and that makes it really easy to line up all the things in a column. You can use the horizontal guide to line up the tops of all your headers, etc.

Expanded Poster Template

You start putting all your stuff into the poster template you downloaded, and darn, you run out of room. Here’s an easy way to get more space.  The first thing to know is that if you change the size of the page in PowerPoint, it stretches and sqeezes what’s on the page to fit the new page, which is not very helpful. You’ll need to do the following :

Select all by hitting control+A
Cut by hitting control+X (erases everything to the clipboard)
Change your page size to be a little larger
Paste everthing back in using control+V

You can then widen your columns to have more room.  Hint- select all the columns at once by holding down the shift key and clicking on each in turn, and widen them a little bit all together. This keeps them all the same width. Select just the boxes, not the content.

I often add height, since having taller columns gives you more room with the same text box widths.

Remember, the maximum size that PowerPoint allows is 56″ in either dimension. If you are already at 56″ width, adding height is often a good solution. If that is a problem, here’s something that usually works: change your page size to exactly half in each dimension, i.e. a 36×56″ goes to 18×28″. Then, do the cut and paste routine from above to give you an 18×30″ or 18×32″ poster. We’ll print that at 200% to give you 36×60″ or 36×62″.

Poster Template

OK, you’ve dowloaded a poster template from us, and you want to change the look of it. It doesn’t matter to us- change away!  As I like to say, I’m just  a poor old printer and I’ll print what you want.  Lot’s of people have templates from their institutions, or something they set up, and we are happy to print whatever you send us.  Our PowerPoint templates are simply for your convenience.

To change the background, you’ll want to go to format>background in PowerPoint 97 to 2003, and Design>Background Styles>Format Background in 2007. You have a choice of solid colors, gradient fills, you can even use a picture as a background. If you do use a picture, be sure to put your text in a solid color text box, or it will be hard to read against the image background.

One thing that does not work well in printing of PowerPoint files is transparencies. They work great for projection, but the way a printer renders them is not so good. Use a lighter shade of the color you want instead.

We have a little MegaPrint logo on the bottom right, and while it breaks our heart that you would want to remove it, you can by going to the master page. The master page sits below everything and you can’t edit it without going to the master page. We put it there so it doesn’t get in your way as you move things around on your poster.