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Presenting Your Research: Research Posters and Presenting to Different Audiences

Learn how to effectively communicate your research, either on a poster at a conference or verbally in a different setting. Topics include basic design principles, best poster practices, general design tool options and more.

Tools

There are lots of graphic design tools available for making research posters. Which one is the best? The short answer is "the one that works for you". All the tools have different features, price points and user interfaces, but none of that matters if you are not able to do what you want with it. You will need to a choose a tool that matches your tech skills, price point, and design abilities. Below are a few options and some resources for learning how to use them. 

Regardless of which tool you use, you will need to know how to do the following in the tool: 

  1. Change the size and orientation to fit your poster needs
  2. Add and change text, font, and text size
  3. Add graphs and graphics and size them appropriately
  4. Change colors of elements as needed
  5. Export the design for printing

You can find directions for completing each of these tasks in your chosen software by simply searching Google or another search engine with the name of the software and the task. Most of these tools will have tutorials made by the company with videos, step by step directions and photos of how to preform the task. Use these resources over ones made by third parties as those can have a lot of ads and irrelevant information, and are more likely to be outdated. 

Tools

PowerPoint is a slide editor that many people use as a very basic graphic design product. Grinnell College students have access to PowerPoint. You can use it in the browser, but please download the desktop version and use that for your posters. The benefit of PowerPoint is that people are fairly familiar with it so there is not a learning curve to it. However, it is not an amazing tool for graphic design and you will not be able to do anything too exciting or creative with it. 

Grinnell College provides research poster templates that are PowerPoint files

 

Adobe products like InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop can be used to make posters. These programs can make some stunning graphic designs, but there is a steep learning curve to using any of these products. They are also expensive and Grinnell Students do not have access to Adobe products like they do for Microsoft products. We do have computers in the basement of Burling (in the Digital Studio and the Mac Lab) that have these products available. These programs are made and used by professional artists and graphic designers, and they are not at all user friendly for beginners or people on a tight timeline.