PowerPoint
A popular, easy-to-use option. It is part of your Microsoft Office Felician account package and is available on all library computers and through your Office 365 account. (Advice for creating a poster with PowerPoint).
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign
Feature-rich professional software that is good for posters including lots of high-resolution images, but they are more complex and expensive.
Open Source Alternatives
OpenOffice is the free alternative to MS Office (Impress is its PowerPoint alternative).
For charts and diagrams try Gliffy or Lovely Charts.
A complete list of free graphics software.
Are you preparing for an upcoming conference? Need to design a poster for your class? This guide will give you tools for communicating your research for academic conferences and professional meetings in a concise and visually effective poster presentation.
What?
Posters are ways of communicating your work visually and concisely to interested viewers. As viewers walk through the poster display area, they may skim your poster, stop to read, or ask questions. A poster session is a good opportunity, not only to explain and promote your research or project, but to get feedback on it, make connections with researchers working in related areas, and possibly even meet a future employer.
Often held in conjunction with scientific conferences, poster sessions are an important part of the scientific communication process. They allow you to reach a large audience more informally than a prepared research talk and to interact directly with interested viewers.
Why?
Posters, in general, are an effective means of communicating complex information in a simplified and approachable format.
Effective posters will have not much time to convey its message. Therefore the message being delivered has to be done clearly, easily and without much preamble or other context given.
An essential element to creating an effective poster is paying mind to the aesthetics of it – it must be visually pleasing. You have to visually pull in your audience member to talk to them.
A strong scientific poster can help showcase your research in several ways. (Illustration: Jon Wagner, Presenting Science Concisely)
You might be preparing for a poster session for a number of reasons:
Regardless of the purpose, the same basic principles of poster design and presentation apply. Some details may vary depending on the requirements of the session organizer and whether you are presenting for a class assignment or for a conference.
Local Poster Printing
Staples East Rutherford, NJ
Students: Check the events calendar for upcoming Poster Presentation workshops, email a librarian for an appointment, or ask your professor to schedule a class session.
Faculty: Contact your liaison librarian for a consultation or to request a Poster Presentation & Design session for your class.