Lancaster General Health Sciences Poster Session: Poster Guidelines

Poster Dimensions

Your poster will be 48 inches wide by 24 inches tall. There are 4 Lancaster General Health/Penn Medicine PowerPoint poster templates available that are already pre-sized. You are not required to use these templates, but if you create your own background/temple, please make sure that the size is set to 48 inches wide and 24 inches tall. If you submit a poster that is not the appropriate size, it will be returned to you for this adjustment. Please feel free to change the colors, background and add other relevant logos (such as collaborating institutions).

Poster Components

The poster generally should contain the following components*:

  • Background (information on why you are doing this study/project)
  • Aim/Hypothesis or Research Questions (the question or problem)
  • Materials and Methods (how the study/project was conducted and what materials were used to conduct the study/project)
  • Results (this can be text, tables, charts, graphs, etc.)
  • Conclusion (the nontechnical interpretation of the results)
  • References (if necessary)
  • Future Research/Acknowledgements (optional)

*Follow these component guidelines as they apply to your area’s requirements. Some components may be omitted.

Tips

  • Most text, charts, graphs, images etc. can be pasted into the template textboxes.
  • Avoid wordiness and use bulleted, concise sentences whenever possible
  • Data collection instruments can be converted to a pdf document and then copied as an image into poster.

Format Consistency

  • Pick 2-3 fonts. Use the same Font for all… (size, color, capitalization, alignment). Some examples are as follows:

Headings (i.e. 40 pt Goody Old Style, Bold, Shadowed, Garnet, Centered)

Body Text (i.e. 28 pt Verdana, Black, Left Justified)

Labels (i.e. 20 pt Arial, Black, Centered)

  • Pick two or three colors, use throughout poster – if you have logos or other graphics in your poster, pick colors that will match or tie together the content on your poster
  • Keep shading same (color and fade)
  • Keep borders same (color, style and thickness)
  • Keep objects (text boxes, headings) aligned vertically and horizontally
  • Keep margins and gutters consistent
  • Keep line spacing consistent, adjust for readability

Poster Readability

  • Title banner read from approx. 10 ft
  • Body text read from approx. 2-4 ft
  • Suggested font sizes (depends on font)

Title of poster 50-54 pt

Author(s) and institution 34-36 pt

Headings 36-40 pt

Body Text 26-30 pt

Labels 16-20 pt

  • Pictures/images need to be 150 dpi at full size. Example: if you want a picture to be 5" x 10" at full size and the image you have is 2.5" x 5" then it would need to be 300dpi
  • Be careful with certain color combinations for the background, font and graphics as this can greatly improve or degrade readability.

Charts, Graphs & Tables

  • Avoid sensory overload – too much information on one chart
  • Avoid artistry gone wrong – while 3D is pretty, hard to interpret
  • Avoid distortion – adjusting scale to give appearance of greater effect
  • Avoid huge tables of raw data
  • Microsoft Excel charts/graphs and Microsoft Word tables are the most compatible with the PowerPoint Template. If using charts, graphs or tables from other software please make this known ahead of time