How to make a poster

We will make our posters using Microsoft Office PowerPoint. 

Our posters will be 24x36 inches in size. 

Download and modify this PowerPoint template above for your poster. You should download this as a powerpoint file. You can also download it from this Google Drive link, but make sure you download as a PowerPoint file.

If you have difficulty downloading this as a PowerPoint file, let Professor Fails (fails@oakland.edu) know, and he will send it directly via email.

This template is custom-sized to 24X36. DO NOT CHANGE THE DIMENSIONS OF THIS SLIDE!

You are free to modify the colors, Design/theme, placements of the text boxes, etc. These slides discuss some of the basics of editing the text boxes, shape colors, shape outlines, in PowerPoint. 

Of course, every project is different and will have different needs of materials to be presented. Some of you are presenting quantitative, large-N projects, which will require the presentation of data and other quantitative results in tables, figures, etc. Some of you are doing case studies and other qualitative methodologies, so your needs will be different. Such projects may be better served by using maps, pictures, and other visual elements to develop the argument. It is up to you to determine how best to present your project in a visually-compelling fashion. 

When in doubt, you should always use more visuals (pictures, figures, graphs, maps, etc.) than text!

Slide Design Tips

• Typically, posters should read from top left to bottom right, like you are reading a page with multiple columns of text.

• It’s important to maintain a good contrast between the background color and the text color. Consider using a light color background and dark text.

• A gradient color fill in the background, especially black, will print poorly. It will have very thin visible lines that you will not see on your computer monitor.

• The colors that you see on your computer monitor will not reproduce exactly the same on a printed poster, as monitor color settings vary. You can expect that there will be a color shift of 2 or 3 shades.

• Our posters will be printed on photo-quality paper. Standard background colors will print fine on this, but this also means that you can be creative and liberal with your usage of pictures and visually-compelling design and backgrounds. The print shop will charge us the same cost whether you have a boring white background or many high-resolution pictures, so design your poster accordingly.

Graphics

• Images copied from the web are low resolution (72 dpi) images and are not proper quality for inclusion in your poster.

• Limit image resolution to 150 dpi to ensure their ability to print.

• All graphics should be pictures (e.g. .tif, .gif for transparency, .jpg for non-transparent images) inserted directly into PowerPoint (NOT linked from another program). The preferred image format for all inserted images is JPEG if you do not need a transparent background.

• If you have graphs or charts from Excel to include in your poster, simply copy in Excel and paste into PowerPoint.

• Do not enlarge images after they have been inserted into PowerPoint.

• To adjust an image and retain proportion, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and click and drag with your mouse on one of the corners in order to scale it.

Text

• It is best to use a font that is cross-platform to ensure that your poster looks as you have designed it. The fonts suggested here are all cross-platform and should be found on most systems. If you use a downloaded font that is specific to one environment (i.e. only Mac or only Windows), you must embed that font in your PDF.

• Sans-serif fonts are the best for posters, particularly for the title, subtitle, and headers.

• The most common fonts are Times New Roman and Arial. Other fonts include Arial Black, Franklin Gothic Heavy, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Verdana, Garamond, Book Antiqua, or Bookman Old Style, just to name a few. This is not an exhaustive list, just a few examples.

• You will have to adjust the font size depending on the amount of text in your poster and the style of font you choose. For readability, you should not use a font size any smaller than 18 points.

• For consistency, it would be best to make all the headers the same size and use the same font size throughout the poster for all body text.

• If your text is in a different file (e.g. in a Word document) be sure that it pastes into a text box in PowerPoint so it can be more easily edited. To do this, use the Paste Special command and choose Unformatted Text so that the text will become a PowerPoint text box. If you just copy and paste, your text will be an imported word processing object, which will not be as easy to edit in PowerPoint.

Saving and Submitting your Poster

• Once you are finished with your poster, please save the file as “YourLastName.ppt” and email to fails@oakland.edu

• I will save double-check your poster, and then save each as a PDF. The print shop requires PDF format, but I will take care of this last step.

• Most importantly – your posters must be emailed to me by the deadline of April 10. This is to ensure that we have time to print the posters.