Project Poster Notes
The information here isn't particularly specific to our poster (the tips and examples certainly aren't).
Tips
Examples
You can generally walk through any of the science buildings and see examples of academic posters on the walls. As a general comment, most of them have too much text.
Many of the above “tips” links have examples as well.
Technical
You can create a cut-and-paste poster if you wish, but a computer-generated poster printed on a large-format printer is generally more professional and polished looking.
Poster printers generally print on a continuous scroll of wide paper. The printable area is typically 36". So, your poster should be formatted for a “page” that's 36 inches high (or wide, if you want a vertically-oriented poster). The poster boards at SFU have internal dimensions of about 45" square, so your poster shouldn't be bigger than 45 inches in either dimension.
There are many pieces of software that you can use to make such a document. PowerPoint is quite common, based on the you-probably-already-have-it criteria. Design programs like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator are also good choices. It's also possible to produce a poster in LaTeX. Bitmap programs (like Photoshop) are generally inappropriate: a vector-based image is needed to print at this size with reasonable clarity.
You will likely have to convert your poster to PDF for printing. You can use CutePDF to do this from any program under Windows.
Printing
There are several options for printing:
- Most copy-shops (Staples, Kinko, etc.) can print posters. They can be quite expensive. If you are planning to go this way, your best bet is probably to find a shop that has a poster printer in-house and ask about their turnaround time. Also ask about student discounts.
- In particular, the Campus Printing Centre (the copy-shop in the Cornerstone building) can produce posters. They prefer PDF files, or Powerpoint if PDF isn't possible. Their turnaround time is 1–2 business days.
- Document Solutions (or Reprographics, or Duplicating, or whatever they're called today) can print posters.
Most (all?) of these options require a couple of days lead-time to get the poster printed. Make sure you allow for that. Before you complain about the cost, remember: I could have made each of you buy a useless $100 text book.