1. Posters: The Big Idea
2. The Procedure for Creating a Poster
3. The Art of Poster Design

Posters: The Big Idea

Sooner or later in ENVS we will ask you to make a poster to share your fine work with others. Posters are commonly used to communicate research results in the natural sciences, sometimes used in the social sciences, and not used too much in the humanities. But they offer us an opportunity to view many different projects at once, and they also encourage you to summarize your work in a succinct and visually compelling manner, so we'll often produce posters no matter what kind of course or topic. Here are the items a good poster usually includes:

• Identification information (name[s] of student[s], course, and semester/year)
• Title and optional abstract
• Background text and graphics introducing your topic
• Focus question(s) or hypothesis guiding your work
• Procedure you followed (or propose to follow) for addressing this question/hypothesis
• Results you obtained (if completed research), or timeline for completion if proposal
• List of references cited in text and for supplemental reading

The Procedure for Creating a Poster

Your poster will be a maximum 40 inches wide by 32 inches high, as that's the size of the foam board it will be affixed to. This size will work for the large-format printer in the Resource Lab (in the bowels of Watzek Library) which is the location you can get your poster copied. You may design it with any computer application you wish, but many students simply set up one big Powerpoint page for their poster:

1. Go to File > Page Setup
2. Choose Slides sized for Custom
3. Enter width and height accordingly

Once you've printed trial copies (at your expense!) to make sure everything is perfect, you may print the final large-format color copy at the expense of the ENVS Program (email envs@lclark.edu to get the necessary budget information), provided it is for an ENVS course or you have received permission to do so.

A big caveat: make sure you give yourself, and the Resource Lab, plenty of time! The lab gets extremely busy at the end of the semester, and if you're doing a project for a large ENVS course you can bet that lots of other students will be using the lab too.

We would appreciate if you let us keep the copy of your poster so we can display it; if you want your own copy let us know. In any case, to get credit for your work we also ask you to upload an electronic version (i.e., the Powerpoint file or a PDF) to the related assignment on your Moodle course page we can share your fine work online as well. Make sure your file has your name on it (and make sure your poster has your name on it too, of course).

The Art of Poster Design

The above doesn't really get at how important and difficult it is to make a good poster! Remember, you are trying to communicate your work in a clear, convincing, and attention-getting manner, so budget time to do a really nice poster.

One of the keys to a clear and attractive poster is font size: remember that you want to design your poster to be comfortably read by a viewer at a distance of around three feet.

• Main poster titles should use a font size somewhere in the 60-100 point range.
• For the body of your poster, something around 30-50 point font is a good start.

Resist the urge to throw too many font types into the mix! Also, try not to overlay your text over busy backgrounds.

There are lots and lots of design hints available online. Here are a couple that can help you get ideas:

• Swarthmore College: A comprehensive site on poster design. Did you know the ideal poster has 800 words or less? What color top should you wear when you present your poster? These questions and many, many more are answered here.
• Napier University (UK): Simple but useful advice on formatting and font choice.
• Lewis and Clark College: Look through examples of course posters done by other ENVS students here.

The most important thing is to try your poster ideas out on your fellow students by printing a small version and sharing it widely. There are lots of good ways to design a poster, but there are lots of bad ways too, and your peers may see things you don't because you are too close to your work! (The perennial problem of the scholar.) Feel free to email envs@lclark.edu for any guidance re: the above.


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