March 23rd, 2010 by Jay Buckley
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?
March 17th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
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.
March 9th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Recycling our scrap
We just made another trip to the recycling center with a load of scrap paper. It always drives me crazy to see all that wasted paper.
One of the things that really sets us apart from our competition, however, is that we are willing to throw out a poster and print it over if we see a problem with it. Most people ( if they even look at your poster) will send you one with a mistake in it, so long as you made the mistake.
We don’t. We’ll fix it and print another one. Maybe you pay a little more for the poster we print for you, but at least you only pay once.
March 5th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
- Fabric Research Poster
I had a customer ask me the other day about why they should do business with us instead of a local print shop. Here’s what I told her, and I hope I was convincing!
First of all, we specialize in this field. It’s not a sideline for us. We have a group of graphic designers that print research posters all day, and we have all the right equipment to do it well and quickly.
I had a friend in college whose family ran a construction company. One of his favorite sayings was “If you want to catch a mouse, call a cat.” It was his way of saying that people who specialize in a particular field save you money, even if you pay them a little more. As importantly, they save you aggravation! Get somebody who gets it done right the first time, and get on with it. We like to think that in the research poster field, that’s us. People from over 800 universities and companies agree.
We do a lot of things that other companies don’t, like archive your files from the past. It seems that every day somebody calls and asks us if we have the file from last year’s poster- and we do. We have an electronic system that lets us look up your past orders to get you a copy of the bill, or just to know what you ordered last time, and we can do it while we talk on the phone.
March 2nd, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Scientific Research Poster
One of the things we have been hearing recently is that you design your poster on your Mac at home, then email it to yourself at work where you hope to edit it on your PC. It becomes a mess! As you have discovered, PowerPoint is not terribly faithful across platforms, as well as between versions.
We have some suggestions for making this a little easier:
Do- Use Arial and Times New Roman fonts only, and Symbol for Greek letters. Staying with these fonts makes a lot of the problems go away.
Don’t- Use transparency and drop shadow effects. These are available in the PPT 2007, but they don’t save if you save it as a ppt instead of a pptx. Transparency effects also confuse printer drivers, so it’s best to avoid them altogether.
Do- Import jpg files for images whenever possible. All versions of PowerPoint know what to do with a jpg. Some other formats, especially png on the Mac, don’t make the cross platform trip.
Do- Use paste>special when importing charts and tables, and import them as an enhanced metafile. This turns them into artwork that is uneditable, but it keeps them from going wild if you change their size.
Finally, get everything together on one computer, proof it carefully, and send us the file. We’ll run it on the same program and platform you used, and the results will be perfect.
February 26th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
- Self Standing Research Poster
Every now and then, a conference tells you to bring a poster that is self standing. They don’t give you a board to mount your poster on. What to do?
We have a solution- a
tri-fold poster. This is a 48×36″ poster mounted to foamcore board, and scored on the back so that it folds into a 24×36 for shipping. You take it out of the box, spread the two wings out, and voila, free standing poster!
There’s a
template on our site for a tri-fold too.
If you already have a 48×36 poster, there’s a trick for using it with a cardboard poster display board that you buy at an office supply store. Our tri-fold web page, linked above, shows you how to attach a poster with binder clips.
February 23rd, 2010 by Jay Buckley
- New Ordering Screen
We’ve just gone live with our new online ordering setup at postersession.com. Over the last few years, people have suggested some imortant features, and we’ve tried to implement as many as we could. We have a jazzy new look, too!
The new system allows you to enter foreign addresses when you want your poster shipped overseas, it prices smaller and larger posters, and allows for payment by PayPal.
Under the hood it is faster and implements new security features. It also works better if you go back and forth between pages, which our old programming didn’t do so well.
We hope you like it- please let us know if it causes you any trouble. We’ve tested it very thoroughly, but there’s always a bug or two that slip through.
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!
February 12th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
- Our Poster Printing Shop in snow
We’re pretty used to snow in New Hampshire. Usually we have four feet or more on the ground by this time of year. We expect the bad weather, and it rarely interrupts our operations. Once in a while, Fedex will pick things up a little early, but if we said it will ship today, it will.
Last week’s snow in the middle of the country created a lot of hardship for a lot of folks, including Fedex, who delivers most of our packages. Fortunately, both Fedex and our customers knew it was coming. We encouraged people who were on a tight schedule to ship overnight instead of 2-day, just to be sure things got there on time. We shipped a lot of things a day ahead of schedule too, just to give a day of cushion.
We ship a lot of
research posters on very tight schedules here, and one of the reasons we use Fedex is because they are so reliable. Having said that, it is always a good idea to have an extra day built into your schedule. Just in case a snowstorm goes through Memphis.
February 10th, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Open Face Type on a scientific poster
We printed a scientific poster this morning that uses what’s known in the graphic design field as an “open” type face or font. It’s when the type isn’t solid.
First of all, open face type can be just plain hard to read. Your eye likes something distinct and solid to read, in part because that’s what it is used to seeing. Open face type is really designed for fanciful things like greeting cards, where only a few words are used. You can get away with “Congratulations” in an open type face, but it makes a lousy title for a poster and it’s even worse if used in the text body of a poster.
The other problem with open face types is contrast. Since you don’t have a big solid letter, you lose the strength of it. If the color of the type is something other than black, and the background is something other than white, things can get really hard to read.
So do yourself a favor. Use Arial for titles, and Times New Roman for the body text. Use Symbol for your Greek letters. And forget the open type faces on your research poster. Your goal in producing a research poster is to share information, not create a fanciful work of art.
