Design Process

This section provides tips on planning and executing an effective poster.

Preparation | Create Your Poster | Print Your Poster

Create Your Poster

Brainstorm Content

Consider what information is necessary to communicate your message.  Remember, you most likely do not need to include all of the information gathered, so choose only the information and graphics pertinent to conveying your message.

Structure Content

Once you've decided what information to include in your poster, focus on organizing and arranging your ideas. For this purpose, you may wish to use notecards, or software such as the outliner in Microsoft Word or a mind mapping program such as Mind Manager. Organize the information you want to present into major topics (such as Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions) and subtopics.

For more information on poster content, see the Content page in the Design Elements section of this tutorial.

Layout and Design

A clear visual layout is essential to an effective poster. You may want to start by drawing a rough sketch of your poster in order to get an idea of how you want to arrange text and images.  For example:

For more information on layout and design, the Design and Layout page.

Create your poster on a computer

To create your poster on the computer, you need to decide which software you want to use. We recommend Adobe InDesign, which is an excellent page layout program. However, some people have gotten good results using Microsoft PowerPoint, which is more widely available. For more information, see the Using InDesign and Using PowerPoint sections of this tutorial.