Creating a Science Poster Using PowerPoint

What is a Scientific Poster?  A visually coherent means of presenting research  Images, rather than text, should dominate a poster  The poster must follow the standardized format for presenting scientific research including:  title, abstract, objective, introduction, results, discussion, conclusion, references and acknowledgements.

Example

Working in Groups  Meet early on in the process and sketch out common goals  Make each group member accountable for a specific task  Establish a space where you can share ideas, research, work-in-progress, findings, etc.

Before You Get Started  Sketch your plans first  Lay-out  Focus  Don't forget …  Design Principles  Make every mark count

Creating Your Poster To build your poster, open PowerPoint and when prompted to create a new slide presentation, at the new slide screen, choose a blank slide. This blank slide will serve as your canvas, i.e. as your main poster board. You will have only this one slide so everything that you usually do on all slides in a PowerPoint presentation, you will do on this one slide.

Re-sizing Your Poster  Next, you must format the blank slide to meet the dimensions required for a poster. To do this, go to File>Page Setup> choose Custom under the “slides sized for” heading and set the size guides to 42” wide by 36”high.

Sections of the Poster  All posters must follow standard scientific presentation  You do not necessarily have to write out your methods if you instead use an illustration.  Also, a poster is not necessarily a book so you do not have to arrange the sections in a manner which corresponds to an expected book order.

This is the Title of Your Presentation Jane Q. Citizen, Hunter College, CUNY Honors College Introduction and Objectives Lay in your introduction x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Population Studied x xx x xxxxxxxx Methodology x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Study conclusions and ideas for new research x Discussions xxxxx Funding Source

Poster Text  Inserting a textbox  Font Size: 18 (1/2 inch)  Font style: Arial or Times  Bold headings and sub-headings whenever possible …  Acknowledgements or references < 18 font

Be succinct …  Do not use too much text!!!  Make every word count  Shoot for short, concise sentences that are well illustrated.  As well, any legends for maps or graphics need to be short and readable.

Image Format  Save all photos as high resolution images (at least 300dots per inch (dpi), as tif or Jpg images.  You will have to play around with quality and file size so that they will print clearly on the final poster (you are essentially blowing these photos up so the quality will degrade substantially).

Poster handout It is very effective to also create a one-sheet paper handout that includes key points, sources, annotations and contact information. When you hand this to interested viewers of your poster, they can take away the core story of your work.  If you do create such a handout it should be created as professionally and effectively as your poster, and is best produced on high-quality paper.

Printing Your Poster  Where: ?  When: Allow for at least a week when printing your poster  Be sure you carefully proofread the sample  Avoid strange fonts and symbols