How to make a poster for a symposium or conference

Basic thoughts

A well-designed poster is a great way to show your work. You get the possibility to show pictures and show the relationship between different aspects of what you have done. The content does not disappear immediately as it does in an oral presentation, so people looking at the poster can take their time and think about your ideas.

It is a visual presentation of your work and should not have great quantities of text. Also, the font size needs to be big enough to be legible from a couple of metres away.

Even though you will be expected to stand by your poster during the poster session, posters are often put up earlier and taken down later, so the poster should be self-explanatory. Your poster should a) catch people’s attention; b) tell them what question you were trying to answer and c) tell them what you found out.

Creating your poster

There are many ideas about how best to do this, but the way we recommend is to use Powerpoint. We have provided a couple of templates you can use. Your poster is created as a single Powerpoint slide. Take a look at Una’s poster to see how she did it. You might like to plan your poster on paper first.

If you use our templates, you can take away the UC logo if you want, but please do not change its position or size. The easiest thing to do is to stick within the white area. If you are not using our template, you need to set the page size manually when you start using Design > Page Setup, so if you want an A1 poster (594mm × 841mm), you should specify this before you start. For A1 posters, the title should have font size 60, and text font size 20-48. You can create text boxes to write text in and you might like to use Powerpoint’sSplit text into columns function in the Paragraphs menu. You can place pictures and diagrams quite freely on the space available to you. You might find the SmartArt functions useful to combine text and graphics to tell your story. Make sure you aren’t copying a small picture into the poster template, as the quality will be very poor when it is printed. You can check this by looking at the pictures (or parts of them) on the screen in 100% size. When you are satisfied, save the poster as a pdf file, and take a look at it again before you send it to us. If you can, print out the poster in A4 size and take a good look at it before you send it off. All text should be legible when you print the poster in A4 format, otherwise it will be small on the poster.

Content of the poster

  • Make sure the title and author's name are prominent and eye-catching.
  • Remember to include contact details or affiliation so people can get in touch to ask more questions.
  • Tell a story: provide clear flow of information from introduction to conclusion
  • Focus on your major findings - a common fault is to try to cover too much. Few delegates are going to read everything on your poster, so get to the point.
  • Use graphs, tables, diagrams and images where appropriate. Use boxes to isolate and emphasise specific points.

Design suggestions

  • Use all the space at your disposal, but do not cram in the content - white space is an important part of the layout, and good use of it can make a poster elegant and arresting.
  • Use colour sparingly - limited use of a few colours is more striking than a 'rainbow' approach. Think about why you are using colour; it is especially useful for emphasis and differentiation.
  • Avoid colour combinations that clash (e.g. red on blue) or cause problems for people with colour-blindness (e.g. red and green in proximity).
  • Use white or muted colour background (e.g. pastel shades)
  • The flow of information should be clear from the layout; if you have to use arrows to indicate the flow, the content could probably be arranged better.
  • Clearly label diagrams/drawings and provide references to them in the text where necessary.
  • For this symposium, the poster size is A0 or A1..
  • The title text should be readable from 6 metres away - at least 48-point text. (Note that if you are creating your poster in A4 format, to be blown up to A1 format later, the final printed font size will be approximately 3 times the size you are working with.)
  • The body text should be readable from 2 metres away - at least 24-point text
  • Choose a clear font with large inner space (i.e. the space inside the loops of letters such as 'o', 'd', 'p'). Good examples are Arial, Verdana, Georgia or Helvetica.
  • Serif or sans-serif text? Short answer: it doesn't matter, as long as it's legible. See Alex Poole's thorough article "Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces?", which punctures a few of the myths surrounding this subject.
  • Keep the word count as low as possible.

Sources of images

These are sites where you can obtain copyright-free images for use in your posters:

  • Google Creative Commons Images using the 'usage rights' filter at the bottom.
  • Flickr Creative Commons - images for which the owner has specified a Creative Commons licence
  • Wikimedia Commons - archive of free multimedia content submitted by Wikipedia users.
  • MorgueFile - probably the best single source of free photos.
  • JISC Media Hub - Free images from the Getty collection.
  • FreeFoto.com. A collection of free photographs for private non-commercial use.
  • Image*After - large, free photo collection, with images free for any use.
  • The Creative Commons search allows you to search Google, Yahoo, Flickr and other sites for material that is licensed under the Creative Commons - which usually means you can use it without charge in a non-commercial context.
  • For more sources of images, see CLT's multimedia resources listing.

Re-use of this text


Una Cunningham. This document is partly based on and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.