Poster Production

Important: Cite CTSI on your poster if your research is funded by the CTSI grant

Content

• Keep purpose in mind (your purpose and conference purpose)
• Consider audience (technical background, etc.)
• Think "press conference" —max 2 minutes/2 pages of info
• Some content can be omitted to be included later in your published paper (e.g. extensive lit reviews or bibliography, complex tables)
• Emphasize most important results, rather than showing all results

Design

• Sell your content
• Keep material simple
• Be selective in what you present
• You want passers-by (who are also eating breakfast, drinking coffee, and talking) to get something from your poster in 30 seconds
• Use logical order (people are used to reading in columns (top to bottom) from left to right, or in rows (left to right) from top to bottom
• Label sections to help guide, e.g. use research journal manuscript sections or some derivation thereof as appropriate to your content
• In addition to title, authors, affiliation, and usually acknowledgements, you chould include "what, why, how, results, so what?"
  • For example, use one or more relevant headings from each category:
    • What: objectives, purpose, hypotheses
    • Why: background, theory, context
    • How: methods, design, sample, data, measures, analyses

Color

• High contrast (e.g. dark text and light background)
• Beware of large blocks of bright colors
• Beware of dark or patterned backgrounds
• Gradient backgrounds sometimes don't print well
• Use color to emphasize/differentiate/add interest (not just because they're there)

Font

• Large enough to see from at least 5-8 feet, e.g. 14 (if printed at 200%) for text, larger for section headings and even larger for title (to be seen from 15-20 feet)
• Simple font (e.g. Arial)
• Italic and bold work better for emphasis than underlining
• Keep to one (or very few) font types
• Minimize use of all caps

Graphs/Pictures

• Should be understandable, readable, relevant
• Follow basic guidelines for statistical graphics
• Beware of clipart (use when it clarifies, illustrates)
• Use appropriate resolution for images/photos
• Minimize use of multitudes of numbers—use graphs whenever possible
• Jpg files are usually more efficient than other types for images
• Images and objects should be inserted, not copy/paste

Printing Services

• Save your PowerPoint files as a PDF to view the final poster (Depending on your printer, colors can look different on your screen than they will actually look printed.)

1. UCSF Campus Life Services Documents & Media
   Phone: 415-514-2054
   Locations & Hours
2. Biotech Productions UCSF local vendor, same-day free delivery to all USCF facilities.
3. Makesigns.com Posters can be shipped directly to the hotel in the city where you will present. Use the glossy option. Very reasonably priced and they have great travel tubes.
4. MegaPrint May take a UCSF purchase order. Website provides examples.
5. SciFor
6. FedEx (aka Kinko's)
7. PosterPrentations.com