 3. Designing your poster Have you ever felt stressed wondering what actually makes a design look good? When it comes to designing a poster, there can be a lot of decisions to make. But how do you decide what will actually make your poster look best? In this video, we will explore five principles to help with your design process. While this video is about poster design, these principles can be used when creating any type of design product. Whether you are creating a presentation for an undergraduate research symposium, designing a business card to land your first job, or making an infographic for a class project. Let's begin. Principle 1. Proximity When related information is clumped together with white space separating it from surrounding elements, it's utilizing the principle of proximity. This means items that are related to one another should be close together. For example, visuals should be paired with text or visuals that are related to them. Accordingly, headers should be close to the section they describe. While ensuring related elements are close together, don't forget that white space between elements is key for a clean visual look. Because it's so important, let's talk about white space just a little bit more. If everything is clumped together, it's hard to see the order of information. Every element, whether it's a picture, header, section, column, or the whole poster should have consistent white space around it. That means the same amount of white spaces should be included on every side. White space should also occur both outside an element and inside an element. For example, there should be white space around a text box separating it from other elements, but also white space between edges of the text and the borders of the box, so the text is easy to read. Principle two, alignment. Every element on the page being visually connected to something else shows the principle of alignment. This means elements should not be floating out on their own, and that elements should align with each other. Alignment helps create visual order for your audience. Principle three, repetition. Repetition is intentionally repeating design aspects throughout the poster. Repeating aspects like font, color, or size can help the audience make connections between information on your poster. For example, making all the headers on your poster match helps the audience easily jump from section to section. However, be careful not to draw false connections. For example, if this icon and nearby chart use the same exact colors, the audience might assume they are correlated even though they are not. So repeat wisely. Aspects of your poster like color and font should also match the tone of your content in the context where the product is being used or presented. For example, a somber topic might not come across well with bright colors, and a cheerful topic might not work with monotone colors. Principle four, contrast. Making your design elements the same or very different uses the principle of contrast. Repeating elements will help your audience draw connections, but it's also important to tease out specific elements to showcase their importance. For example, here are three graphs. Let's make them all the same size, color, and style to show they are connected to one another. But maybe one graph is more important to the conclusion made in our research. Now let's make that graph bigger than the others. Now our visual shows that these findings are connected, but this graph is particularly more important. While all our headers should repeat their style, they should also look different than body text to help the reader pinpoint which text to read first. By changing the size, weight, color, or font of the header, we can make it stand out against the other elements. Principle five, balance. When the visual weight of the design is equally distributed, the principle of balance is at work. That means there isn't one element overshadowing another. And elements aren't stacked too far to one side. The big things you will need to balance on your poster are text, visuals, and whitespace. For a truly balanced poster, about half of the poster should be visuals. About half should be whitespace, and only a quarter should be text. To hit these marks, try to include a visual with each section if possible. Add significant whitespace around every element, and use the least amount of text possible. There should also be various types of visuals spread out across your poster. This means there should not be just pie or bar charts. Multiple types of visuals will increase the balanced look of the design and make the poster more engaging. Conclusion. Designing an effective poster can be tricky. The great news is that these five principles of design can help you make more informed decisions about the look of your poster. Using proximity, alignment, repetition, contrast, and balance will help make your research more accessible and approachable for your audience.