 The best research posters do a great job of using basic visual design principles. In general, you want to use patterns, shapes, images, and placement of all of those things to show how your ideas are related. First, let's focus on images. Images can be used in several different ways to control how people are experiencing the information on your poster. You can use images and symbols as clues to help your reader understand big ideas more easily. You can use them as a central focus to draw people's attention somewhere, either if they're far away or if you're leading them through an information path. And you can use them as visual anchors to help people read text more easily. If each chunk of text has an image or a symbol associated with it, it'll be really easy for people to navigate the different ideas on your poster. You can almost think of the whole poster as one big diagram of information. That diagram should make it obvious where people should start reading and what they should read next and where they should finish. To find useful images, you need to search for public domain or creative commons licensed images only. This will make it possible to share your poster anywhere at any time without having to worry about copyright lawyers hunting you down. The best way to do this is to find a website that specializes in public domain or creative commons licensed images and do your searches there. To show you what this looks like, I've brought up the search function of creative commons up here and you might be looking for a picture of penguins to use. And that'll give you some options. Here on the sidebar, you can see the ways that you're allowed to reuse those images. So some of them can be used if you give people credit. Some of them you're allowed to modify and distribute again yourself. So there's a few different ways of choosing images that are appropriate for your needs. If you just don't want to worry about it, you can choose CC0 and public domain and those you can do basically anything with and not worry about it. The other important thing to do with images is to make sure that they're the right size to use on your poster. Because posters are so large, you also have to choose very large images in order for them to print effectively. If you use a small image and make it larger by stretching it, it will print very poorly and look blurry or pixelated. So for example, back on the Creative Commons website, you can use the advanced settings to select an image size. So we'll look only for large images and see what's available. The next thing to consider is your font sizes. You want to choose simple fonts and not use more than two or three styles of fonts. Otherwise it can get pretty messy. You also want to keep your text very large. Text should be readable from five feet away and to accomplish this, the smallest text on your poster should be 25 point font or larger. For your title and headings, you might use a font size like 150 or even 180 depending. When choosing colors, you need to make most of your poster include dark text on a light background in order for it to be easy to read for everyone. It's okay to use a dark background for some small sections of your poster, but to make it easy to read and to make sure it prints well, you need to use a light background for most of the poster. When printing colors, you have to expect the printed colors to look different than the colors on your computer screen. So as snazzy as it might look on the computer to use, light, light green and kind of light green next to each other. When they print, they're not going to look that different and it'll get confusing. For example, the green bar under the title of this slide is not a good choice for printing because the two greens are too similar. You won't see a difference when they're printed. When choosing colors, design for everybody. Roughly one in 25 people have some form of color blindness, so it's very likely that many people who view your poster won't be able to tell certain colors apart. To make everything work well, you can label all your data very clearly. You can use features in addition to color to help people understand information, including shapes, styles and patterns, and always make sure that colors that touch each other have different levels of brightness. Here's an example. Try to figure out which of these graphs is most likely easiest to read and identify why that is. Here's what the graphs look like without color. Graph on the right also uses contrast and patterns to clarify information, so it's a little easier to interpret quickly. One of the most common design mistakes on posters is when people don't leave enough space between all the items on their poster, making it look crowded and more difficult to read. It can be really overwhelming sometimes. When printed, it's ideal to have at least a quarter inch of space between almost everything on your poster. Even if you don't make any other adjustments, just fixing the spacing on your poster can make it look two times more professional instantly. It can also help you make sure that you've included just enough information instead of too much.