postersession

Foldable Fabric Research Posters-Accept No Substitutes!

Jay Buckley — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:59:46 +0000

: Foldable Fabric Poster

We’ve been selling our foldable fabric research posters for over two years now, and we are finding great acceptance of them. Something like a third of all we make are now made of our foldble fabric.

We went through a lot of work to identify and qualify a foldable fabric that would print accurately, not take a crease, and that would work properly with our printers. It was a pretty extensive project, and we evaluated a dozen materials and tested four or five. The foldable fabric we use was the best we found.

We also know that we are the only people who are using that particular material for foldable fabric posters. So somebody who tells you that they have the same stuff? They don’t! They are using one of the products we rejected.

There’s a lot more to making a great poster than buying a roll of stuff and putting it on your machine. That’s why we are the best in this business!

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Research Poster Carrying Tube

Jay Buckley — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:39:19 +0000

Standard Poster Tube

Before you jump on the plane, a little planning is required to be sure your research poster arrives with you, and in good condition. Suffice it to say that you can’t just roll your research poster up and put a rubber band around it, and expect it to be nice and fresh for your poster session.

We sell a telescoping plastic carrying tube that will protect your poster during your travel, and for $25 it’s a good investment. You’ll be able to use it many times.

Our prejudice is never to check your research poster with your luggage- too many bad things can happen! You want to carry it on the plane. Of course, it raises the eyebrows of the security people, looking like a bazooka as it does. But, they see them all the time and are pretty used to them.

The other issue is that the tube counts as a piece of carry-on luggage. We’ve heard so many stories of people having to pay for an extra piece of checked luggage that we often suggest that they try our foldable fabric posters, which can go into your briefcase or carry-on.
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How to really screw up a Research Poster

Jay Buckley — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:25:29 +0000

: Not So Good Poster

Do it right and your research poster speaks well of you and the research you have done. Do it badly, and it’s like having a stain on your tie. Here’s some things to avoid:

1. Print a bunch of 8-1/2 x 11 sheets and tack them to a board like the poster at the right. This went out 10 years ago and tells people you didn’t consider it important enough to present a professional poster.

2. Cram a ton of small type on the poster. Who’s going to read all that stuff, if they can read it at all?

3. Using very low resolution pictures. Look at your poster at 100%. If you see big squares of color, your poster will look like that too.

4. Put black type in a blue or other dark colored box- it will be hard to read.

5. Try to be artsy by putting a picture in the background. It will be hard to see what it is anyway, and it makes your poster too busy.

6. Put shadows on the text. Especially on smaller text, it will be very hard to read.

7. Go from Mac to PC, back and forth. PowerPoint does not transfer very faithfully between platforms, especially if you use a type font like Monaco that’s only on the Mac. Things will move around!

8. Crowd the edges. Good graphic design says you should leave space around things.

9. Make it too small or too big. Posters should be 3×4 feet at least, but no so big that they hang off the edge of the board.

10. Copy your institution’s logo off the Internet- it will be low resolution and look terrible.

That’s my quick list, but people invent new ways to mess up every day! You can always call us for a quick consult about your research poster and we’ll help you get it right

Printing QR Codes on Your Poster

Jay Buckley — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:47:42 +0000

Sign with a QR Code

It’s a good thing we checked! Our customer asked us to print a number of these posters for retail stores, and Ken in our shop grabbed his smart phone to be sure it would read the QR code. It didn’t! It turns our that QR codes need to be of a certain size, depending on the length of the URL they are pointing to. Who knew?

Here’s a web site that talks about the size of QR codes when they are printed.

http://www.qrstuff.com/blog/2011/01/18/what-size-should-a-qr-code-be

Whats going on is that as the web address gets longer, the QR code needs to store more information. A short web address will only need a QR code with 25×25 boxes, but a long web address can get up to 57×57 or even more.

Your smart phone needs to see each dot at about .4mm on the screen to be able to read it. That means a short web addres (a 25×25) will be about 1 cm (3/8″) across on your phone. If you have a 57×57 QR code, it will need to be nearly an inch across. If it’s not big enough, your phone chokes on it.

For poster printing, figure the typical reading distance to be 10 times the width of the QR code. For instance, 4″ across if people will read it from a distance of three feet, which would be typical for a research poster. The code also needs to be clear enough at print size that each pixel of the code is readable. We increased the size of the QR code on this poster, and it worked fine.

Fabric posters make travel easy

Jay Buckley — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:27:48 +0000

: Goes in your carry on!

Air travel these days is bad enough without having to:

1. Check your luggage and wait for it when you land and

2. Pay an extra $25 or more for the priviledge!

So we offer scientific posters printed on a foldable fabric that you can put into your carry on luggage. It saves you time and money, and the poster doesn’t count as another carry on item. And, of course, you aren’t going through security with a poster tube that looks suspiciously like a bazooka!

Our fabric scientific posters look great- they accept inks just like paper does, and give great results even on hard to print things like flourescent stains and X-rays.

Research Poster Printing from Mac Files

Jay Buckley — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:28:39 +0000

: One of our Macs

We lost a visionary in the industry yesterday with the death of Steve Jobs. The world is different because of his vision, and his achievements are to be admired. I had the opportunity to meet him back in 1981, and it’s amazing what he accomplished in his all too short life.

We see a lot of research posters that are designed on the Mac. It’s often the platform of choice in academia and graphic design.

Those who have taken their Mac research poster files between the Mac and PC platforms have struggled with how things jump around when you go from one to the other. Things just happen differently between the platforms, and something as complicated as a research poster will often display differently.

We solve this problem by asking you which platform and version of PowerPoint you used when you designed your research poster, and then printing on whichever platform you used with the same version. That gives us reliable results! If your research poster printer isn’t asking you which version and platform you used, be prepared for things to go crazy on you. Our competition often requires you to send them a pdf, which means that problems with your file become your problem.

It takes a lot more knowledge, money, and effort to print your files reliably from either platform. We are dedicated to printing your Mac designed poster files properly, and it’s one of the reasons we stand above other research poster printers.

Word Poster Templates

Jay Buckley — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:45:26 +0000

: Research Poster Session

Every now and then I get someone who wants a poster template for Microsoft Word. Here are the reasons I give them that Word is not such a good program for designing a poster:

1. Word is made for producing documents, and forces margins on the sides, above, and below whatever you type. You really don’t want a foot of white space around your poster, but that’s what a Microsoft Word poster would get.

2. Word will drive you nuts because it wants to fit everything into paragraphs of text. Try moving a picture to the bottom right hand corner of a page, it pops back to wherever Word thinks it should go! PowerPoint lets you put things anywhere you want on the page.

3. If you have Word, you probably have PowerPoint. We’ve got great templates in PowerPoint that you can download for free. If you don’t have PowerPoint, try using Open Office, which you can also download for free. It will open our PowerPoint templates, which are in ppt file format.

4. Maximum page size in Word is 22″ in either dimension, for PowerPoint it’s 56″. The less we scale the page, the better for print quality, so especially for large size posters Microsoft poster templates should be in PowerPoint!

Vertical Poster Templates for Free

Jay Buckley — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:59:31 +0000

: Vertical Poster Template 36×60

I had a conversation with a customer yesterday, and we were quite a way into our talk when it came out that he was going to Europe to present his research poster. Most scientific poster sessions in Europe use a vertical poster template, and he had set his up to be horizontal (landscape orientation). It would be a real mess to go all that way and find your research poster didn’t fit on the board!

So the next time you land a trip to the old country to present a scientific poster, be sure you download the free powerpoint template with a vertical orientation. Careful about sizes too-they are metric over there, and will give you poster dimensions that way. We have free metric templates as well on our web site. Very often you can copy and paste information from your existing poster into a metric template with a minimum of fuss.

We also have a large library of special size free research poster templates that we have done over the years, and we are happy to send you one if you need it. We’ll even design a poster template in a special size for you!

Research Poster Printing

Jay Buckley — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:21:24 +0000

: Poster Printed by Postersession.com

There’s some fuzzy math going on out there, so I thought I’d set people straight. Somehow they think it’s less expensive to print a poster themselves than to buy it from a company that specializes in the printing of research posters.

People think: I can buy a poster printing machine for $10,000, and then the paper and ink for a 3×5′ research poster will only cost me about $15, where buying the poster costs $75.

I only wish I made $60 on every $75 scientific poster I sold! Here are the things they forget to consider:

1. Somebody has to spend their time printing the poster. They need to be trained and managed. They get medical, vacation and other benefits. What’s your fully costed rate if it takes a half hour?

2. They need to dedicate space to the printer, the cutting table, the tools, etc.

3. Someone who has printed posters for years can help your poster be better, both by seeing problems and by fixing them. There’s a lot to be said for having an expert looking it over.

4. You need to buy inventory and make sure it’s being replenished.

5. Are you going to qualify materials so you’re sure to get a nice, bright print? How about learning the different setting on your print driver that give you the best color, and often need to be changed when doing things like X-rays?

6. Print 100 research posters a year on that machine, and over a 5 year life that’s $20 per poster. Oh, did I mention that the service contract on the poster printer is $2500 a year? Add another $25 a poster.

We pay for people, equipment and space, and so does anybody else. At the end of the day, we probably make $10 on a poster, and we earn it!

Custom Poster Templates in PowerPoint

Jay Buckley — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:13:52 +0000

: Custom Poster Template

Over the last several months, we’ve generated scientific poster templates for a number of our customers. It seems that hospitals, especially, want to put their brand identity into the scientific posters they produce. We help by generating a scientific poster PowerPoint template using their logo and brand identity look.

If your corporate marketing types want to extend their brand identities to your scientific posters, give us a call. It is usually not terribly difficult to put together a free poster template that you can then use to design your scientific posters. We’ll make sure the colors are rendering properly and that you’ve got a nice crisp logo. We can talk to your marketing folks and make it happen pretty easily, and we don’t charge for it.

From then on, you can drop your text, charts and graphs, and photos into the custom design poster template and send the file to us for printing. You can be assured that your scientific poster will be printed properly and beautifully. The poster at the right is one done from a PowerPoint poster template, and it looks fantastic!