Final Project Presentations: Sustainability Office Celebration Poster Session

May 31th, 1 – 5 pm (poster session 1-3 pm) - Stevenson Event Center

Your final IDEASS presentation will be a poster session at the annual UCSC Sustainability Office Celebration. Bring your draft poster to class next Monday, May 7. Final posters should be emailed to and by Friday May 11. One poster should be completed per project/group, not per individual.

Poster Content:

  1. Title
  2. Abstract/Summary about project
  3. Project goals, pictures of your project,funding mechanisms, process/outcomes,charts, tables and/or statistics on project's success
  4. Logos (IDEASS, LSA, and CenSEPS required)
  5. Information about you (your group) andpicture of yourself(ves) with a short bio

Poster Resources:

  1. Gabi Kirk has open office hours, MWF, from 10 AM - 3 PM.

Sustainability Poster Guidelines:

Poster Layout & Printing Size: 24” x 36”

Poster Presentation Guidelines

  • You have very little time and physical space to communicate your ideas, and as you know you are competing with a very demanding environment. Audience members will be stopping by your poster but also will be partaking in conversation with others, eating food, and looking at other posters. Think about how you can use diagrams, graphs, pictures, data, and small amounts of text to communicate your ideas clearly and concisely. Be sure to ask yourself:
  • What is our objective or goal for the poster?
  • What message do we want to convey?
  • What few things do we really want our audience to remember the next day?
  • How can we get them to care about what we’re saying?

Brainstorm the answers to these questions BEFORE you start designing your poster. You should be able to answer these questions in a few sentences. Come back to the answers as you design your poster. Does your poster still clearly convey the answers to these questions?

Design Tips

  • Coherence and Legibility – Poster must be understandable. At the very least, it should be readable from a distance of at least 6 feet. Consider using informative headings and subheadings to help the reader navigate. Use simple text (sans serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica) and stay away from too many bright colors, distracting pictures, or curly and overly artistic fonts. Your poster should be pleasing to the eye, but your project is the star of the show, not the layout.
  • Simplicity – People can only take in a few chunks of information at a time (5 different aspects, plus or minus 2, it is said). Craft concise text and use graphics that are easy to understand, has few distractions, etc. You may want to write and edit your text for simplicity and content before you start the actual poster.
  • Comprehension – Comprehension of the poster will be greatly facilitated by using a simple and consistent structure, particularly if this overall structure is obvious, easy to see.
  • Restraint – Do not fill all available space with information. White space is important. Do not mount a manuscript that would take 20 minutes to read. Photos, color, and a catchy titles may attract attention but could also distract. Do not sacrifice content for flash. Keep it simple, tell a whole, coherent story.Most importantly design a poster that creates a message that is portable, and can be recalled the next day.

Recommended Software: PowerPoint – This is probably the simplest program to use, but be aware that colors may not print exactly as they appear on the screen. Blues, in particular, tend to look more like purple.

Tips for Using PowerPoint:

  • Be sure to change the dimensions of the slide before designing it. See additional document “How to Design a Poster in PowerPoint” for how to do so.
  • Do not copy and paste images onto the slide. This may cause problems when printing. Instead use the Insert tab to insert a picture from a file.
  • Submit your final poster in .ppt or .pptx format.
  • Test your poster on a different computer before emailing your final copy. If you designed on a PC, check it on a Mac, and vice versa, to make sure your fonts and pictures came through.