There are many approaches to creating a poster and you should sit down with your faculty mentor to discuss details from what images to use to ensuring your text is edited. However, here are a few notes on preparing the document for printing.
Software: Most posters that come to us to be printed are created using PowerPoint and the explanations below are written with PPT in mind. PowerPoint provides a familiar interface for interacting with images, text, and tables. If you do not already have Office365 installed on you computer, it is a free download with your university Bravemail account and can be installed on your personal computer.
Students more comfortable with a vector graphics application such as Adobe Illustrator or the open source Inkscape, or a raster graphics application such as Adobe Photoshop or the open source GIMP, are welcome to use these as well. No matter what software you use to create your poster, please be sure to save your document in a standard format such as PDF to make sure we can open your poster.
Poster size: The standard size of posters for both the poster events hosted on campus is 48 inches wide by 36 inches tall (48×36). To set the page size in PowerPoint 2007 or later go to the Design tab and locate the Slide Size tool. Once you have opened the Slide Size tool select Custom, set the width to 48 and the height to 36.
Image sizes: Please be sure that any images you use are equal to or larger than the size you want them to appear on the poster to avoid the blurriness caused by pixelization. If you do stretch any images larger than its original size, zoom in to view your poster at 100% using the slider tool in the bottom right of the window to make sure the image does not become blurry. Also, make sure that you do not elongate your image. You can check that you do not change the images original aspect ratio by right clicking the image and selecting Size and Position and ensuring the Scale Height and Scale Width are the same value.
Text boxes: You can define the width of text boxes once they have been created by right clicking on the bounding box and selecting Size and Position and defining the width. You can also ensure your boxes are aligned by choosing the position tab and setting the vertical and/or horizontal position.
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