Best way to make a poster

[Mattias]

Hi,

I have got a green light to make a poster presentation for HPLC 2013. What software is the most convenient and gives the most professional result? The printing will be done by a print company.

Any other good tips and tricks are also welcome!

[fendersim]

What size poster is it?
Also, you designing on Mac or PC?

[tlahren]

I've used both MS Power Point and Corel Draw in the past. If you know how to manipulate Power Point already then I would suggest using that. You just adjust the size of the slide to the actual dimensions of the poster you want and start building it. You can send it to the print company as a PDF or some will accept it as a .PPT/.PPTX file or other image format. Corel Draw has more features than PP but it has a learning curve if you've never used it.

[Mattias]

I do not know the actual dimensions yet, but I assume that it will be fairly large (1x1.5 meter?). I want to have it on one page. It will be made on my job PC. I do not have access to any professional drawing programs, but I didn't think about Powerpoint. Good suggestion!

Do anyone of you know of a "state of the art" poster? Like a dream poster should look like. Something for inspiration.

I intend to make a poster about the ion-exchange properties of the most common C18 UPLC columns, and how this (not controlled) effect can be a robustness issue for UPLC methods.

[Kristof]

I recommend CorelDraw if you have access to it. There's going to be some learning curve though, less steep if you already feel confidend in using other software e.g. PowerPoint. An advantage of CorelDraw is that it can export in exact format printing companies can easily handle without messing with your colors or dimensions - in my case it was always TIFF at approx. 150 dpi resolution and CMYK color coding.

Size would depend on conference and organizers should give you an idea. It is usually between A0 and A2 paper format.

[tlahren]

Kristof is right about the color format etc. When PPT is converted to a PDF the colors look different and many times the characters can change depending on what type of font you use in the PPT. There will be some trial and error getting a PDF that looks correct.

[Jack Silver]

I don't like Powerpoint because it changes the typeface size if one starts to "overflow" the confines of a text box, yet still reports the original size when clicking on the text!! I like to know if I'm running out of space while still having readable type.

I haven't used Corel in years (buggy & expensive back then- it's probably better now) but I would choose that over powerpoint. I also use Microsoft publisher although it is quirky- my company puts it on our computers.

I like to generate graphs in Origin rather than Excel and save them as WMF files. The Excel files often like like the lines were drawn with crayon (thick), even if saved as WMF, when used with non-Microsoft products. The WMF files are vector graphics which can be made to different sizes without aliasing (steps on the lines) from the same image.

[MaryCarson]

IMO, professional look to the poster is less a function of the software you use (Powerpoint can work, if you know how to use it), than of the thought that goes into the design of the poster. You can google "scientific poster" and find all sorts of advice on designing an effective poster. Here's one such site:
http://www.cns.cornell.edu/documents/ScientificPosters.pdf

I use Powerpoint because it's what is supplied by my employer. I design with the grid "on" so I can align graphics and text, and I periodically zoom out to get the overall effect of the poster. Printing drafts is a good way to see whether your color scheme works. One of my personal criteria for readability is that I print the whole poster on a letter-size sheet of paper--and I should still be able to easily read everything. Handout mini-posters are also nice to have at meetings.

[lmh]

Sooooo agree with Mary Carson. Posters with massive blocks of tiny text are horrible to read. Most poster-sessions have 100 posters, and everyone is milling around chatting to friends, and probably a bit tired after several talks, and they're balancing in one hand a cup of coffee and as many biscuits as they could grab. Only those posters that are strikingly simple, and that can be read in a minute, will actually get any attention.

On the other hand, a poster should tell me something. I hate posters that say "We are great because we've written a great bit of software/developed a new method" without telling me what's great/new about it. A poster needs a story, just a very very short story.

Loads of good posters have been made using PowerPoint. Your thought, planning and design-skill make more difference than the software. You can minimise technical disasters by giving the printer a printout of how it looks on your normal office printer. If you send a .ppt file, make sure you embed the fonts.

Think what you want your reader to take away (the message)
Decide what key data they need to see, and cut it to the bare minimum, as simplistic a view as can be made
Explain the message, the experiment, and the data in as short a text as you can
See if you can make the text any shorter
If you have room, and there's anything really pretty you can add, which doesn't detract from the story, but which makes your poster stand out visually, add it
Try Mary's test that the whole thing can be read comfortably on A4 paper.

[DJ]

I bought a license for "postergenius" software. It's very easy to use-- you select a template, indicate how many many/what kinds of sections, paste your text into dialogue box and the software moves, twists, align, shrink/expands so that everything fits. I wouldn't make a poster any other way. Conversion to pdf is seamless