3 parts, cos I talk too much :P

I recently had an A0 poster of my MSc dissertation printed for presentation next week. My motivation was to create an *attractive* and primarily *visual* basis to my paper; I didn't worry about results and tables, as readers will have these to hand in conference proceedings. The poster then offers an opportunity to expand on the paper content a bit, giving you the chance to emphasise key 'take home' points, in mine, the development of two modified algorithms, for example.

I'm a freelance multimedia specialist/designer when I'm not an academic, so I knew the importance of *design for visual clarity* (how often do you switch off when you see e.g. a set of lecture notes that is just pure text?) Too much text on a poster is visually offensive, and won't make the content any easier to understand. Use big text that can be read across the room for titles, and try to compartmentalise key points within individual, visually distinctive blocks (easier to digest chunk-wise) - you've likely got stacks of space, so use it to the full. Saying this though, don't be too scared of whitespace - it's generally necessary to set the 'leading' of any blocks of text (space between lines) a little higher than default. Trust your eye - yours are as good as any other viewer's.

Think also about a 'commentary' as the viewer scans your poster - from top to bottom it should communicate coherently.

For my own paper, I've two key take home messages (my algorithm methodologies), but there's a bit of background knowledge necessary for these to be understood. So, I divide the poster into 4 sections, the topmost (likely where the viewer looks first for the start of the information stream) lays out the basics, following on with the second, which expands into a new but related concept directly relevant to my two points; the final two then lay out my messages nice and clear.

Important basics of design for print - Use Adobe Illustrator (download 30 day free trial if you don't own it), and set the document size to the poster size, ensuring that all imported images are *at least 300dpi*. Generally for printing onto paper media you should set any colour mode to CMYK, otherwise expect to be looking at a very different colour to that which you intended for. Your chosen print house will love you for sending them a .ai file of the right dimensions and colour specification, all ready to go. You might have the option of 'encapsulation', which is basically a glossy, water resistant finish, otherwise, plain old matte will suffice.

even 4 parts inductible

wow, thanks everyone, got lots to get me going now

This one!